advanced format support

English Hardware
1

hi

with opensuse 11.4, is there something special to do to be able to use it with an advanced format hard drive?

thanks

2

hi

with opensuse 11.4, is there something special to do to be able to use it with an advanced format hard drive?

thanks

If by “advanced format hard drive” you mean hard drives with capacities above 2.1 Terabytes (which have been positioned by companies like WD for Windows 7 and MAC’s) it is my suggestion you just stick with 2 TB versions for now until all of this crazy stuff is settled. Among issues, only the most reset computer BIOS handle the issue properly as well. With the really good 2 TB hard drives out there (often way below $100 as well US), including SATA III (6 GB speed), why not stick with something known to work properly with your BIOS and with your Operating System like Linux?

Thank You,

3

no advanced format hd use 4096 bytes sector instead of 512 bytes

Advanced Format - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

some os have problem with that

4

I’ve got one of those on a USB external HD. The main thing is to align the partitions on a 4k boundary when doing the fdisk. Do a search for that, I don’t remember any particular web pages.

5

The trick is to align the partitions on 4k sectors. Use parted to do this. Then everything goes smooth with advanced format disks. I have been bitten by WD EARS drives and this solved the problem.

iowait slows system down - Page 2

Also see:

4K vs 512B alignment?

6

On 08/04/2011 05:16 AM, vodoo wrote:
>
> The trick is to align the partitions on 4k sectors. Use parted to do
> this. Then everything goes smooth with advanced format disks. I have
> been bitten by WD EARS drives and this solved the problem.
>
> ‘iowait slows system down - Page 2’ (http://tinyurl.com/3njx8vy)
>
> Also see:
>
> ‘4K vs 512B alignment?’ (http://tinyurl.com/3v9lj9p)

I have a drive with 4K sectors that I am using with a 2.6.29 kernel. Linux was
able to handle such drives before they were invented. :slight_smile:

You can set up these disks with old versions of the utilities. As the WD drives
actually report 512 byte sectors, you MUST ensure that every partition starts at
a sector that is a multiple of 8. Running fdisk blindly will fail as it starts
partition 1 at sector 63. Moving that to 64 makes #1 be OK.