I have a machine running 11.3 and I want to increase my storage capacity but am maxed out with 6 SATA hard drives already. Does openSUSE 11.3 see and write to drives 1 terabyte and above correctly?
I have been using WD Green drives in this machine up until now but see Samsung and Hatachi drives at really good prices. Are these drives reliable? How is warranty support?
I have a 1TB and a 2TB drive working fine, albeit as external drives, so there isn’t any “1TB limit” or anything like that. Where did you get that idea anyway. Sounds like you have a whole bunch of small drives. Maybe it’s time for you to consolidate all of that on a large drive and save power too.
Actually it’s 6 500 gig drives so it’s not a collection of trash drives.
I thought I read that the block size was different on newer 1 gig and above drives. This is my concern as it could lead to drives that are not properly utilized and slowed access times.
I installed a SAMSUNG EcoGreen F4 HD204UI 2TB drive in my home theater box under 11.4 and it works fine. There was a problem with these drives that is solved with a firmware flash. So if you can do that you can get 2TB drive for under $80.
As for the block size that is controlled by the file system. But I doubt it would have any noticeable impact on reading or writing the drive.
As far as being maxed out with 6 SATA drive so am I. I bought a card that goes in one of the PCI Express slot you aren’t using. Not the one for the video card but that small one near it. I have the 2TB drive on that and I have zero problems. It even has room for another SATA drive on the controller card. I have seen cards that have four connectors for SATA drive but be careful with them. Usually they have two SATA2 and two SATA1 connectors so you don’t get the speed you would like. But hey two ports for two 2TB drives will hold a lot of DVD images. I have coolers on all the hard drives in my system. This takes up extra room so to put in the last drive I had to drill four holes in the top of the case and mount the drive to the top of the case. I think my case is maxed out now.
And if I was you, and I was in the same situation, I would start getting bigger drives and replace the 500gig drives. My home theater system now has drives no smaller then 1TB but I think my data is doing things when I am out of the room. The drives seem to be filling up all by themselves. 
The last three hard drives I have purchased have been Hatachi including two that are SATA III, two 1 TB’s and 1 that is 2 TB’s. They are well priced I assumed due to the announcement that Western Digital was buying them in March, though I guess I never heard if the sale was final or if that was why there are such good bargains for Hatachi right now.
Thank You,
The only problem that you will encounter with the larger drives is with those
that have 4K sectors. All such drives report (falsely) that they have 512 byte
sectors, and will read correctly no matter what. The difficulty occurs when the
partition does not start at a multiple of 8 (512 byte) sectors. As the old
defauolt was to start the first partition at sector 63! When that happens, a
writee of a 4K bunch of data ends up writing 3/4 of the info into one 4K sector
and 1/4 into a second. The double writing really slows the system down.
The newest versions of the partitioning tools do it right, but you can force it
on older versions with care. BTW, I am running 2 1TB drivers on an 11.1 system
running a 2.6.29 kernel. One of those drives has 512 b sectors and the other 4Kb
sectors. I got it wrong at first, but after repartitioning, all is good.
It’s got to do with the switch to 4kB physical block size and not anything to do with a magic 1TB limit, but of course having larger blocks reduces the number of sectors that have to be accounted for. See lwfinger’s advice just above.
This 11.3 machine is running a 2.6.34.10-0.2-desktop kernel.
How are you supposed to know you are buying the right Drive? I don’t really want to have to fiddle with guessing what i have. I also don’t want to do any partitioning outside of what YAST2 might do for me automagiclly.
I plan on removing the old drives with the partition manager one at a time then adding back in the new drives creating partitions/formatting them and dragging the data back on to them via USB. Then Ill go about setting the NFS shares back up and getting the client machines seeing the new shares.
On 08/28/2011 09:46 PM, FlameBait wrote:
>
> This 11.3 machine is running a 2.6.34.10-0.2-desktop kernel.
>
> How are you supposed to know you are buying the right Drive? I don’t
> really want to have to fiddle with guessing what i have. I also don’t
> want to do any partitioning outside of what YAST2 might do for me
> automagiclly.
> I plan on removing the old drives with the partition manager one at a
> time then adding back in the new drives creating partitions/formatting
> them and dragging the data back on to them via USB. Then Ill go about
> setting the NFS shares back up and getting the client machines seeing
> the new shares.
There is no “right drive”. If you have any doubts about what sector size the
drive has, then do the research, but then it doesn’t really matter as long as
you adhere to the requirement that every partition starts on a sector that is a
multiple of 8.
As I was using the 11.1 version of fdisk to partition my unit, it had no concept
of 4K sectors. Using the appropriate switch, I got the readout in sectors, not
cylinders. For each partition, I tentatively created it using the size in GB
that I wanted. If it ended on a sector that was 8N-1, then it was OK. If not, I
deleted it and recreated using the sector number. It took a calculator and a bit
of fiddling, but it was not that difficult.
If you are too lazy to do any extra work beyond what the GUI will do for you,
then you are probably screwed.
I use Western Digital drives. The next man may not.
I reckon they are pretty good. The next man may beg to differ.
Personally my largest HD’s are 500GB, but I really don’t use much space. However, several of my clients have a mix of different HD’s 1TB and above, which I have experienced no trouble with. I keep a copy of the latest Parted Magic and do most partitioning with that prior to setting it up on a system.
Oh, and do you mean ‘Hitachi’ not ‘Hatachi’
They certainly have some tempting prices
I have rarely had to resort to anything but the GUI tools in openSUSE. That is one of openSUSE’s strengths not a weakness. I am not “lazy.” I prefer the GUI and don’t prefer the CLI. Too much to go wrong there in my case. I was hoping this had sorted it’s self out by now. Doesn’t seem to have so I’ll wait a bit longer. I am spoiled by how much stuff just works now a days that didn’t years ago. By years ago I mean 1999 which is when I stated using Linux.
caf4926 This machine has all WD Green drives currently. I don’t mind spending very little more for the reduced heat and sound the Green drives provide. My storage needs are going to rapidly exceed the space on this machine at the rate I am accumulating them. Even though I have USB drives it’s a pain turn them on to sort through them the media files I am looking for. I need about twice the space I have now but am out of drivebays and SATA connectors.
Seems the WD drive I would be looking at the WD20EARS at is indeed using 4Kb cluster size.
I’ll have to acquire one and see what the GUI tools I have installed will/can do.
If you insist on using GUI tools, I think the recent releases of parted-magic Live CD support 4kB blocks. But really it’s only a tiny hassle to drop into CLI fdisk to partition the disk. Some day YaST will get updated to handle 4kB.
Samsung and Seagate drives are typically fastest.
Unfortunately, Seagate drives have problems with bad sectors. My Barracuda 7200.12 has already 52 bad sectors after 2 years , so I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.
Other that that it’s still very fast and quiet drive.
I don’t trust Samsung either, after I bought their 640GB drive, that was supposed to be very fast but … it wasn’t. It seems like there were at least 3 different HDD under the same model name HD642JJ (!).
The drive wasn’t as fast as it should, but more importantly it failed completely.
Again YMMV, there are plenty of happy Samsung ans Seagate users. I’m just not one of them. YMMV.
I would go Hitachi or WD way now. Probably Hitachi 7K1000.C 1TB.
Samsung and Seagate are in fact the same company now, the same will be true for WD and Hitachi soon.
The rule of thumb is : you should buy HDD with highest data density and less platters. For example Barracuda 7200.12 has only one 500GB platter, that makes this 500GB drive as fast as 3-platter 1,5TB drive.
Seagate and Hitachi started to offer 1TB per platte drives recently (3TB 3-platter drives).
i have been annoyed with the hard drive manufacturers since they started reducing the warranty period, but to chime in with the reason for this thread… i use Hitachi almost exclusively now (almost three yrs now-previously i used Maxtor), they are still being built in the plants that IBM designed/constructed and i have been satisfied with their performance and reliability (no failures… yet).
i tried Seagates and maybe i got a dud, but that dud sent me on a merry goosechase with their warranty people that i did not enjoy, nor do i intend to repeat.
hopefully their marriage to WD will be advantageous, the one WD drive i have runs about 5C hotter than the three Hitachi’s in the same box and is a hair slower, but a workhorse.
around here a 1TB Hitachi is about 65 bucks US retail, which makes it almost as cheap as storing data on single-sided DVD’s which are going for about $25/100… i am considering this option as my disc horde is proliferating exponentially.
what i need is 1TB SSD’s for 65bucks… 
eternity storage.
I have had to warranty two Seagates. I had no problems doing so but I had approved shipping containers and do live in the USA.
I have yet to have a Western Digital mounted in a computer case fail. I have had one fail that was a USB drive but they only come with a one year warranty compared to three years for a normal 3.5 inch hard drive. The “green” WDs I run; run cool to the touch mostly. They are not speed demons but they don’t need to be for my purposes on my Linux machines that use them. I may sample a Hitachi in my Windows 7 64 box as a back up drive to see how they play on a machine that doesn’t matter much to me if I lose any data on. That machine has a Black label WD in it as access to writes on the main drive does matter due to what it is used for. Latency of any type impacts the software/hardware combo it supports.
FlameBait
Your WD20EARS seems a reasonable choice. I ordered a new (noname) desktop yesterday and it will be fitted with two WD10EARS having 4K sectors like yours. I like these drives because they remain cool when running 24/24/365.
Before openSUSE installation I will boot a parted-magic CD and use parted to partition the drives to my needs. Then, during the opensuse install process, I will dismiss any additional partitioning from the installer and accept just those I already have.
Use the unit command in parted to display sectors. Then start your first partition on sector 64 or higher (63 was the old default, does no longer work). I will use 2048. Keep in mind that the first sector is numbered 0. The size of the initial gap must be divisible by 8. Then make every partition a size of sectors divisible by 8. That’s all about it.
The only thing I don’t think I am clear on is having the system recognize the new partitions I have made with pmagic and when where I create their names names. I am thinking this is in the Partiton manager in YAST when I mount them for the first time if I remember correctly. I think I can get through the maths perhaps through it might take me more than one try 
I can vouch for the cool running of the WD green drives. They are cool to the touch in my system but they are right behind a pair of 120 mm fans too. My CPU is a bit on the warm side as I think I used too much thermal compound but it’s well below any danger point even at forced maximum load. The drives will not fail from heat that’s for sure. In comparison in my secondary system the two Seagates in it are very very hot. The WDs in it are cool to the touch and it lacks the two front 120 mm fans in my 11.3 system