I got a new harddrive with a bit more capacity for my stuff. It’s a brand new WD15EARS from Western Digital. This drive uses, as one of the first, the newer 4096 byte big sector size instead of the common 512 byte. This is indicated on a label on the package and also on the Harddrive including instructions what you have to do when you are using Windows XP to get the drive working properly. Read this Article for more information about 4k sector size HD’s
The last sentence on the label is a lie:
All other OS configurations - drive is ready for use as is
Problem
I installed it yesterday, created a fresh partition table and EXT3 filesystem with gparted and startet to copy my data from the old disk to the new WD15EARS.
Write speed was horrible slow. As a patience person I gave the process a lot of time to finish but after 24 hours only 100 Gbyte was copied…
Very slow transfer rate of less then 1 Mbyte/s!!
Solution
Searching the Internet including the WD forum didn’t gave me an answer. So I tried to follow the instructions for using the HD with the old Windows XP: set jumpers 7-8 prior to installation or use WD Align SW
but no luck!
Where’s the Error?
For me it seems that the problem is that only the consumer but not his operating system knows about Advanced format:
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
The drive does NOT report his sector size so hdparm and all other tools suggest that it is 512 byte (You see this with hdparm -I /dev/sda), what will cause miss aligned filesystem blocks like described in the article above what happens with Windows XP.
More testing
Then I started playing arround with different partion tables (MS DOS and GPT) and different filesystems (EXT3, reiserfs, XFS). All the time it gave me the same result, exept XFS. Anytime you recognise that something is wrong during filesystem initialising because it is way slower than usual.
If you ask, yes it is a quite fresh Linux installation:
Linux zipf 2.6.31-5.slh.3-sidux-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT
nforce 430i chipset
hdparm v9.15
mke2fs 1.41.9 (22-Aug-2009) Using EXT2FS Library version 1.41.9
mkfs.xfs version 3.0.4
mkfs.reiserfs 3.6.21