Hi!
I have the same problem, you might want to have a look at this thread at util-linux-ng mailing list:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.utilities.util-linux-ng/2926
Hi!
I have the same problem, you might want to have a look at this thread at util-linux-ng mailing list:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.utilities.util-linux-ng/2926
BTW, could you try manually aligning the GPT partition?
See below how to do this in parted:
# parted /dev/sdX
# Set units to sectors (in this case 512B):
(parted) unit s
(parted) rm
Partition number? 1
(parted) print
Model: ATA WDC WD15EARS-00Z (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 2930277168s
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
(parted) mkpart
Partition name? []?
File system type? [ext2]?
Start? 64
End? -1
Warning: You requested a partition from 64s to 2930277167s.
The closest location we can manage is 64s to 2930277134s.
Is this still acceptable to you?
Yes/No? Yes
(parted) print
Model: ATA WDC WD15EARS-00Z (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 2930277168s
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 64s 2930277134s 2930277071s
(parted) quit
Information: You may need to update /etc/fstab.
This should align the partition’s start from the 32nd kilobyte (or should I say kibibyte?)
In the meantime I made some similar test like aadamowski and got the same conclusion:
You have to make shure YOURSELF that your partitions are aligned correctly to 4KiB boundries.
A detailed discussion about this topic on the linux kernel mailing list.
Here is a short manual how to create a correctly aligned partition with parted (thanks to aadamowski):
_(WARN__ING: the instructions below will likely destroy any data that’s
on the given drive, only do this with drives you’re intending to
erase):
(parted) mklabel gpt
OK too - untested by me.
(parted) unit s
(parted) mkpart primary ext2 40 -1
divisible by 8.
high performance,
Warning: You requested a partition from 40s to 2930277167s.
The closest location we can manage is 40s to 2930277134s.
Is this still acceptable to you?
Yes/No?
(parted) quit
This should get the optimum performance from your 4 kB physical sector
drives even when they report 512 B sectors only to the OS._
If you prefer to use fdisk follow these steps (they come from ted):
fdisk -H 224 -S 56 /dev/sdb
running fdisk with these parameters ensures that every partition you create is aligned to 4KiB boundries.
Wenn du eine Anleitung auf Deutsch benötigst, schau doch hier.
Hopefully, WD will decide that it is necessery that a HDD reports it’s correct sector size to the OS. Else all the good efforts of the OS and HDD tool developers, like what they currently discuss at the Linux Kernel Mailinglist, is useless and an unknowing user will still get frustrated.
This should be fixed in an firmware update:
hdparm -i /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
Model=WDC, FwRev=80.00A80, SerialNo=WD-WMAVU1361115
Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec SpinMotCtl Fixed DTR>5Mbs FmtGapReq }
RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0 , ECCbytes=50
_ BuffType=unknown , BuffSize=0kB , MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=1_
CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=2930277168
IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
PIO modes: pio0 pio3 pio4
DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5 *udma6
AdvancedPM=no WriteCache=enabled
Drive conforms to: Unspecified: ATA/ATAPI-1,2,3,4,5,6,7
* signifies the current active mode
Hello,
I also bought a WD15EARS drive. I’m totally frustrated. If you think to buy a WD drive and you will use Linux and Windows on those disk: LOOOK FOR AN OTHER DEVICE MANUFACTURE! Maybe you are a harddisk expert and you are motivated to invest many hours, than you can do it. I spend more then 20 hours for partition disk in a correct way with(!) a good performance. And I think every poster on this site too.
I tried the performance script from aadamowski and I can conform the performance problem with Linux. Setting the partitions to the correct borders, like suggested, you can’t use the disk with windows XP! The Windows System can not generate a NTFS on the disk.
I found out with the benchmark script from aadamowski, that the 10 time boost just work if your harddisk is configured with “R/W multiple sector transfer” of 16. By default on my Debian/unstable 64bit system (Kernel 2.6.32.7 with util-linux 2.17 it has the value 1. If I set it to 16 with:
hdparm --yes-i-know-what-i-am-doing -m 16 /dev/sdb
I’m getting the boost (and I don’t know what I am doing there ;-)).
I will give the device a last try, otherwise I will send it back. It’s just a harddisk (I thougt)
Regards
Daniel
BTW: Why is this thread marked as solved? There is a workaround but no solution. And for Linux and Windows I’m having no workaround.
Hi Daniel,
The person who started the thread is the one who can mark a post as the solution if it answered their question or solved the issue for them.
-WendyM
Can you post your partition table here, so others could try to repeat your described problems with the ntfs partition?
I don’t use this drive for dual boot, so I don’t tested this kind of things. But it could be still a important problem to solve in regards to the pending patches for the linux fdisk and parted tools.
After investing some more hours in partitioning a harddisk I have a working setup.
Using the fdisk with -H 224 -S 56 /dev/sdb build a wrong harddisk with problems under windows XP. testdisk shows errors.
Make sure to delete the partitiontable with
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb count=1 bs=1k
and create a new one with parted (see other postings). Then make sure to have them at a divide by 8 boundary.
I have to format them under Windows without(!) the quick/fast mode.
I’m still demotivated about the disk…
Hi !
I’ve recently bought a 1.5TB EARS drive, unaware of the 4kB sector issue. Glad I found this thread.
I tried the fdisk approach, followed by creating partitions in gparted but that left me with the partition starting at 63, which I assume is no good.
I then tried the parted approach, which meant I had one big partition, starting at 40. So far so good. But that’s not the layout I wanted, so I fired up gparted to modify the partition(s) to my requirements (2x 15GB, 1x for the rest).
I then ran into problems:
a) gparted didn’t let me create the first partition as 15GB, 22GB was the minimum. Why ?
b) Went ahead and created 1x22GB, 1x15GB, I for the rest.
When finished I noticed that the first partition now started at 63. I’m assuming that using gparted is the issue. Does this mean I have to use parted to create the partitions, making sure I specify start sectors divisible by 8 ? Why 8 ?
Thanks for any help.
BTW Here’s what I’m planning to do, can someone tell me if this will work:
mkpart primary ext2 40 3750000
I’m assuming this will create a partition from secot 40 to sector 3,750,000, which according to my calculations should be approx. 15GB
I would then create another partition like so
mkpart primary ext2 3750008 7,500,008
which hopefully creates another 15GB partition
Followed by
mkpart primary ext2 7500016 -1
which should create one more partition, taking up the rest of the space on the drive
Or am I going about this the wrong way ?
Hi,
I bought an external WD HD yesterday, a My Book Essential 1.5T. The HD in the box is a WDC WDC WD15EARS-00Z5B1
I was trying to follow and understand all the conversation here and there
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.utilities.util-linux-ng/2926
But it is difficult to find a final answer. Below the result of hdparm.What matters seems to be:
Logical Sector size: 512 bytes
Physical Sector size: 4096 bytes
Logical Sector-0 offset: 0 bytes
With these results, do I need to format my disk with a special method?
For now, I formated the disk using this command:
mkfs.ext3 -T largefile4 /dev/sdb1
But the following gives me:
cat /sys/block/sdb/alignment_offset
0
I would like to be sure that I did good before the disk is filled at 80%…
Here my debian config:
linux kernel 2.6.32-8
fdisk -V
fdisk (util-linux-ng 2.16.2)
parted --version
parted (GNU parted) 1.8.8.git-dirty
hdparm -I /dev/sdb/dev/sdb:ATA device, with non-removable media Model Number: WDC WD15EARS-00Z5B1 Serial Number: WD-WMAVUxxxxxxx Firmware Revision: 80.00A80 Transport: Serial, SATA 1.0a, SATA II Extensions, SATA Rev 2.5, SATA Rev 2.6Standards: Supported: 8 7 6 5 Likely used: 8Configuration: Logical max current cylinders 16383 16383 heads 16 16 sectors/track 63 63 -- CHS current addressable sectors: 16514064 LBA user addressable sectors: 268435455 LBA48 user addressable sectors: 2930277168 Logical Sector size: 512 bytes Physical Sector size: 4096 bytes Logical Sector-0 offset: 0 bytes device size with M = 1024*1024: 1430799 MBytes device size with M = 1000*1000: 1500301 MBytes (1500 GB) cache/buffer size = unknownCapabilities: LBA, IORDY(can be disabled) Queue depth: 32 Standby timer values: spec'd by Standard, with device specific minimum R/W multiple sector transfer: Max = 16 Current = 0 Recommended acoustic management value: 128, current value: 254 DMA: mdma0 mdma1 *mdma2 udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5 udma6 Cycle time: min=120ns recommended=120ns PIO: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4 Cycle time: no flow control=120ns IORDY flow control=120ns
i wonder if its worth the time to try find out, learn, figure out, understand what are you talking about in these 4k sector drives threads LOL
all and all i think those Green 4K hdd are not worth buying, unless you are some HDD guru and intend to use them only with an OS that can use them properly. Same story with the SSDs as well, so complicated … Moving ahead technologically tries to automate and simplify and make more user friendly some aspects of the the previous generation while adds other complexities and absolute productivity killers about aspects of the forthcoming generation: summary = no change in productivity and user friendliness (ms is the best example of this phenomenon)
Hi community,
Have found a tutorial (source: http://www.brain4free.org/wiki/doku.php/blog:wd_advanced_format_hd_mit_linux), translated it from german:
Good description of the problem:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3691&p=2
Using linux with WDxxEARS HDDs is possible but to install them correctly is a bit tricky:
For using WDxxEARS with linux no special software is required. But it is absolutely necessary to partition your HDD correctly. Under Windows XP or under linux using fdisk or parted with default settings WDxxEARS HDDs get partitioned incorrectly. To test, how and where your partitions got created, you can use fdisk:
fdisk -l -u
A typical incorrect example will look like that:
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System/dev/sdc1 63 2930272064 1465136001 83 Linux
It is absolutely necessary, that start- and end-parameter are divisible by 4. Default settings in fdisk, parted and Windows XP do not manage that problem. For Windows XP you need this separate Utility: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/advancedformat/index.asp
For linux, this tutorial will help:
http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/02/20/aligning-filesystems-to-an-ssds-erase-block-size/
fdisk using this parameters creates all partitions aligned to 4 KByte blockboundaries:
fdisk -H 224 -S 56 /dev/sdb
Create Partitions and for security reasons test them in the end.
gparted-gui does not work. You have to use parted in console. You have to ensure that your partitions begin and end at 4 KByte blockboundaries. You manage that by swiching parted showing all units in KByte. Dead shot exactly in Kibibyte ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte). All Numbers you give in then have to be divisible by 4.
Example for an HDD with one partition (Notice the command “unit kib”):
parted /dev/sdb(parted) unit kib(parted) printModel: ATA WDC WD15EARS-00Z (scsi)Disk /dev/sdc: 1465138584kiBSector size (logical/physical): 512B/512BPartition Table: msdosNumber Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 31.5kiB 1465136032kiB 1465136001kiB primary xfs(parted) mkpartPartition type? primary/extended? pFile system type? [ext2]? xfsStart? 32End? 1465138584(parted) printModel: ATA WDC WD15EARS-00Z (scsi)Disk /dev/sdc: 1465138584kiBSector size (logical/physical): 512B/512BPartition Table: msdosNumber Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 32.0kiB 1465138584kiB 1465138552kiB primary
Hope this will help many people.
Best regards,
hans1967
hi dafrizz
i don’t know where your problem with the minimum size partition comes from (normally you get this behaviour for partitions with data on it. am I right that your partition was empty?)
we have to wait for some patches for parted and gparted, so the default behavior is fine for the new drives.
go ahead with parted and you should be fine. i didn’t checked your calculations but what you plan to do looks fine too me. you should get a properly performing drive by that.
hi klubad
please show us your partition details. do this by following what is described in the other posts:
To test, how and where your partitions got created, you can use fdisk:
fdisk -l -u
you only write that you formated the drive, who has created the partition on it? you or during manufacturing?
my guess is, that if you created the partition, you have to go over and follow the instructions here. If the partitioning was made during manufacturing you should be fine.
but thats a quess, please check AND POST your partition table, so we can provide correct instructions for newer My Book Essential drives.
Hi, I recently upgraded my DirecTV HD-DVR HR21 to use the 1.5 Terabyte WD15EARS hard drive. The OS of the DirecTV receiver is linux.
Could someone help be with the commands to resize the XFS partitions that the DVR creates at bootup? The output from “fdisk -l -u” is
Disk /dev/sda: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 182401 cylinders, total 2930277168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000
Device Boot Start End Blocks ID System
/dev/sda1 63 1060289 530113+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda2 1060290 32531624 16735667+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 32531625 2930272064 1448870220 83 Linux
When I open the device in G-Parted, sda1 and sda3 show up as unknown, sda2 shows up as xfs. I must be missing some libraries for g-parted not to identify sda1 and sda3.
Thanks,
Zack
Well, I repartitioned the whole drive and this time didn’t have any issues with any minimum sizes. This is the output from fdisk -l -u afterwards:
Disk /dev/sdb: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 182401 cylinders, total 2930277168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000350f8
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 64 30716279 15358108 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2 30716280 61432559 15358140 83 Linux
/dev/sdb3 63472816 2930272064 1433399624+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb4 61432560 63472814 1020127+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
Partition table entries are not in disk order
Looks to me like the partitions are properly aligned.
Hi,
You can also use LVM to solve the problem:
x64etch:~# hdparm -i /dev/sdc
/dev/sdc:
Model=WDC WD20EARS-00S8B1, FwRev=80.00A80, SerialNo=WD-WCAVY2798944
Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec SpinMotCtl Fixed DTR>5Mbs FmtGapReq }
RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=50
BuffType=unknown, BuffSize=unknown, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16
CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=3907027055
IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
PIO modes: pio0 pio3 pio4
DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5 *udma6
AdvancedPM=no WriteCache=enabled
Drive conforms to: Unspecified: ATA/ATAPI-1,2,3,4,5,6,7
1/ delete all partition
x64etch:~# fdisk /dev/sdc
Delete all partition
w
2/ Install lvm (i use debian)
x64etch:~# apt-get install lvm2 dmsetup mdadm
3/ spend a little time to read the man page
x64etch:~# man pvcreate
…
If the 2nd SCSI disk is a 4KB sector drive that compensates for windows partitioning (sector 7 is the lowest aligned logical block, the 4KB sectors start at LBA -1, and consequently sector 63 is
aligned on a 4KB boundary) manually account for this when initializing for use by LVM:
pvcreate --dataalignmentoffset 7s /dev/sdb
…
4/ Prepare the disk
x64etch:~# pvcreate --dataalignmentoffset 7s /dev/sdc
Physical volume “/dev/sdc” successfully created
5/ Create a volume group
x64etch:~# vgcreate wd2tsata /dev/sdc
Volume group “wd2tsata” successfully created
6/ and the end create the logical volume
x64etch:~# lvcreate --name vm_storage --size 300G wd2tsata
Logical volume “vm_storage” created
7/ Format your logical volume
x64etch:~# mkfs.ext4 /dev/wd2tsata/vm_storage
You can change the size has you want. I use the disk on samba file server, and i transfert 4.4 G on it by network share in 45 seconds. I update later the post if i found a problem during the time of used.
have fun.
Source:
http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_lvm
http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/WhitePapers/FRA/2579-771430.pdf
http://www.mentby.com/mike-snitzer-2/data-alignment.html
Stams
klubad wrote:
I bought an external WD HD yesterday, a My Book Essential 1.5T. The HD in the box is a WDC WDC WD15EARS-00Z5B1
hdparm -I /dev/sdb/dev/sdb:ATA device, with non-removable media Model Number: WDC WD15EARS-00Z5B1 Serial Number: WD-WMAVUxxxxxxx Firmware Revision: 80.00A80[…] Logical Sector size: 512 bytes Physical Sector size: 4096 bytes Logical Sector-0 offset: 0 bytes
Wait, there seem to be something different (and hopefully good) in what _ klubat _ has posted.
It seems the 1.5 TB drive he got is correctly reporting the 4kB physical block size. This is something I haven’t seen reported by any other Advance Format EARS drive owner in this thread or other Internet discussions so far.
Could it be that WD has changed things in the “00Z5B1” models to correctly report the physical block size for the benefit of the Linux-based partitioning tools and so help people avoid getting non 4kB-aligned partitions?. Or maybe the difference is in the fact he’s is the drive inside a external My Book Essential?.
For comparison, I’ve just bought an internal 1 TB WD10EARS 64MB cache Caviar Green drive with the same firmware version as his (80.00A80) but with a 00Y5B1 suffix in the model number that, just like all other posters’ (here and other Internet discussions), reports 512B both for the physical and logical blocks sizes:
$ sudo ./hdparm -Vhdparm v9.28$ sudo ./hdparm -I /dev/sdb/dev/sdb:ATA device, with non-removable media Model Number: WDC WD10EARS-00Y5B1 Serial Number: WD-WMAV5 ******* Firmware Revision: 80.00A80[...]Configuration:[...] Logical/Physical Sector size: 512 bytes
My kernel version is 2.6.33.x. and the drive has no jumper between pins 7-8.