Is there a thread on the new Advanced Format standard? I’m reading that it’s pointed at W7/Mac and I’m thinking Linux newbies (like me) should know in advance, before buying hard drives, what the state of OpenSuSE/kernel/drivers is. I never used to pay attention to hard drive numbers.
WD hard drives with the designation EARS use physical 4KB blocks internally but pretend to the outside world that they have 512 Bytes blocks. The problem is with formatting these drives. Normally the first partition starts with sector 63. This does not divide by 8 (8x512=4096). Modern file systems do not write 512 Bytes blocks, but rather 4k blocks, but these overlap the physical blocks of the HDD and, as a result, every read or write operation affects two physical blocks, resulting in a terribly bad performance.
The solution is easy: use parted to partition the HDD starting with sector 64 and making sure that every partition size is a multiple of 8 blocks. This aligns physical and logical blocks. The trick does not work for XP, but for linux EARS drives are perfect if you are ready for the little bit of extra work.
Very interesting, thanks.
Thanks for the reply!! OIC - I don’t have a problem with using parted, but I do few bare-metal installs these days (I still have a running 10.2 partition on my desktop that I almost never boot to). I guess I could eat my words if there’s some additional trick you didn’t mention! Anyway, there’s an extra problem - I guess using Clonezilla or PING or some such to ghost a drive onto an EARS drive would cause this problem, too. So it’s another tech hurdle we longtimers have to deal with. I’m not sure if it’s possible to ghost EADS -> EARS drives. I’m wondering where the “fix” will wind up - will Linux kernel disk drivers figure a way around it, or gparted, or will the Clonezilla/PING/* folks take up the gauntlet?
I guess now that I think about it, one could do partition copies (rather than byte-for-byte ghost copies) from EADS → EARS drives (not sure about that, tho). The problem would then be the “new” SATA drivers that use the disk serial or model number:
root=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3500630AS_9QG99D7N-part11
… now that I think about it, I’m not sure Clonezilla/PING copies this information - so ghosted drives can no longer be used as backups? Well, I guess I could edit menu.lst to reflect a new drive Model+S/N, but I seem to recall a HAL problem that started, maybe, with 11.2, that causes ghosted partitions not to work right the system somehow…?
The wonders of new technology - making it harder every day to prepare for the next HD crash!
Patti
The transition to a 4K block size has been overdue for a long time. Our processors use 4KB memory pages, our files systems use 4KB clusters (by default), everything is 4KB. The transition to the “Advanced Format” will enable HDD manufacturers to design drives with more capacity (breaking the 2TB barrier). Currently there is no obvious speed advantage for the user, but let’s keep in mind that the “Caviar Green” drives deliver almost the same speed at 5400 RPM as conventional drives.
The big improvement comes with ECC (error correction code) where reportedly “burst error correction stands to improve by 50%, and the overall error rate capability improves by 2 orders of magnitude”.
Some further reading for those who are interested:
Anandtech: Western Digital’s Advanced Format: The 4K Sector Transition Begins
PC Perspective - Western Digital introduces ‘Advanced Format’
http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/WhitePapers/ENG/2579-771430.pdf (WD White Paper)
Dealing with WD Advanced Format hard drives on Linux (part 2)
As for the backup/copy problem: I use techniques based on rsync which respects the existing partitions. Generally I would think that any copy operation leaving the “smart” partitions untouched should work and anything copying over old partitions will break the new drives. I don’t know what Clonezilla does - anyone else?
@PattiMichelle: oops, I forgot something: even if mis-aligned data are written to advanced format drives it still works, maybe dead slow, but it works. The drives emulate 512bytes blocks to the outside. I suggest that you try what happens in your case and - after the mirror operation - inspect the layout with parted.
The forum seems to have lost my reply! Thank you very much for the links and information. I’m not enough of a command line user to use rsync :-/ I posted this question on the PING and Clonezilla forums. Maybe this should be some sort of sticky for folks like me who never pay attention to the “fine print” of hard drive serial numbers? Also, how do you get around the fact that the “new” drivers reference hard drives by model and serial number? (do you just edit menu.lst? What else do you edit when the model/sn change?) Isn’t there also an HAL issue of some sort, or is that only an issue for chipsets?
Here’s a paper that used to really worry me. (I guess now it’s a PhD Thesis) Look at figures 4.5 - 4.7, 5.1, 6.2, 6.3…
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~vijayan/vijayan-thesis.pdf
I have a lot of computers in my laboratory and they “decay” and I have to reinstall the OS’s every 5 years on average. I think it’s due to cumulative unrecognized HD errors that bork apps and eventually the OS. I’d be really happy if the new Advanced Format hard drives didn’t do this any more!!!
Patti
…and of course, how the heck do I move all my computers to Advance Format drives without driving myself crazy?? See why I’m interested in getting Clonezilla/PING to deal with the transition for me? 
:OPattiMichelle:)
Here’s a paper that used to really worry me. (I guess now it’s a PhD Thesis) Look at figures 4.5 - 4.7, 5.1, 6.2, 6.3…
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~vijayan/vijayan-thesis.pdf
I have a lot of computers in my laboratory and they “decay” and I have to reinstall the OS’s every 5 years on average. I think it’s due to cumulative unrecognized HD errors that bork apps and eventually the OS. I’d be really happy if the new Advanced Format hard drives didn’t do this any more!
I think that the new advanced format drives will change absolutely nothing about the problem you describe. The problems reported in the Vijayan thesis are shortcomings of the file systems (unfortunately he did not investigate the ext4 file system). In addition, if you copy hard drives bit by bit (that’s what clonezilla does, isn’t it?) you may even propagate corrupted blocks to the new file system on a fresh HDD.
The only way to clean it up would be to create a fresh clean file system on a new drive and then copying the data. This is essentially a fresh install from scratch.
As I found, Seagate is telling us that every hard disk shipped after 2011-01-01 should be in the new advanced format. This means that openSUSE should adapt Yast “real soon now” to create aligned partitions by default. Or can you imagine every new user doing manual partitioning of their drives?
Some more reading:
Advanced Format - The Migration to 4K Sectors | Seagate
http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/whitepaper/tp613_transition_to_4k_sectors.pdf
http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/whitepaper/tp614_1_deploying_the_next_generation_of_High_capacity_hard_drives.pdf
http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/whitepaper/mb603_1_high_capacity_storage_readiness.pdf
http://www.idema.org/_smartsite/external/bigsector/IDEMA_Long_Data_Block_WhitePaper_6_13_07.pdf