Questions tagged [advanced-format]

Advanced Format hard drives use 4 KiB (4096 byte) sectors, instead of the 512 byte sectors used for a very long time. This change has significant impacts on hardware, BIOS/UEFI firmware, operating systems, partitioning tools, boot loaders and even the performance of applications.

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196 votes
6 answers
85k views

LVM dangers and caveats

I have recently started using LVM on some servers for hard drives larger than 1 TB. They're useful, expandable and quite easy to install. However, I could not find any data about the dangers and ...
12 votes
4 answers
16k views

Upgrading RAID controller to 4kn - do I have to reinitialize the array to use 4kn?

I have an enterprise-grade workstation with an Adaptec 6405E RAID controller in it. According to Adaptec, this RAID controller does not, and will never be able to, natively support 4K disk sectors. If ...
0 votes
1 answer
310 views

How to securely erase damaged hard drive

I have a few hard drives with bad sectors and I want to securely erase all the data from there before I throw the drives away. It's pretty easy even in Windows to format a regular harddrive, and I can ...
1 vote
1 answer
491 views

Extremely Low Random Read/Write Performance on (4096 Aligned) Advanced Format Disks

On a SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s *-disk:0 description: ATA Disk product: WDC WD20EFRX-68E vendor: Western Digital physical id: 0 bus info: scsi@1:0.0.0 hw_sector_size: 512 ...
7 votes
3 answers
3k views

GRUB hangs before menu, after a HDD upgrade. How to debug?

I have a problem on a server with 4 x 1 TB drives running Debian wheezy and GRUB 1.99-27+deb7u3. sda and sdb have partitions mirrored using (Linux software) RAID1, including /boot. sdc and sdd have a ...
4 votes
1 answer
599 views

Exposing disks to virtual machines as 512e

I'm aware that VMware ESXi supports the creation of datastores on local Advanced Format 512e disks as of v.6.5. However, all the (very scarce) information I can find seems to suggest that virtual ...
0 votes
1 answer
37 views

Using a surveillance drive in a Web Server

Would there be any concerns about using a Surveillance/DVR, Advanced Format drive in a Linux Web Server. Only wondering because I have 2x 1TB Seagate Video drives here that are now collecting dust ...
0 votes
1 answer
2k views

HP DL360 G7 4K native sector disk size compatible?

I have a HP DL360 G7 server with a P410i drive controller which don't accept 4K native sector size disks (Seagate ST2000NX0263). LED on drive bay is red. Is there any controller (Adaptec, LSI, Intel .....
4 votes
1 answer
2k views

Does AIX support Advanced Format (4k sector size) SAN LUNs?

I am working with an EMC XtremIO storage array that utilizes SSD devices that use a native 4 KB sector size instead of the traditional 512 B size. I am attaching an IBM AIX 7.1 server to the array. I ...
4 votes
1 answer
2k views

Partition alignment on MegaRAID RAID 1 with 4k sector (advanced format) drives

I want to setup RAID 1 (mirroring) on a LSI MegaRAID SAS 8708EM2 (1078 chipset) with 4k sector (advanced format) drives. To the best of my knowlegde the controller does not officially support 4k ...
10 votes
1 answer
8k views

mdadm and 4k sectors (advanced format)

There are numerous questions on Serverfault about aligning 4k sectors disks, but one thing is not really clear to me yet. I successfully aligned my RAID1+LVM. One of the things I did was use mdadm ...
8 votes
1 answer
3k views

Where is the overhead for ZFS RAIDZ2 on 4K sector disks going?

I started by creating 16 empty files of exactly 1 billion bytes: for i in {1..16}; do dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/temp/block$i bs=1000000 count=1000 &> /dev/null; done Then I created larger and ...
-3 votes
1 answer
2k views

Setting up iSCSI on an external hard drive with 4K sector size [closed]

I have a WD My Book 3TB external hard drive connected to a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine. I'm trying to make that machine an iSCSI target. Everything is set up, but I can't create a virtual hard disk ...
8 votes
4 answers
5k views

Using 4k drives with md/LVM/dm-crypt

I know that I have to align my 4k drives by a multiple of 8 sectors, but what about md-RAID / LVM / dm-crypt? How do I tell these layers that my drive is 4k? If they don't respect the 4k sector size, ...
4 votes
1 answer
4k views

ZFS (NexentaStor) and 4k Advanced Format Partition Alignment

I have a storage system that contains 8 x 1TB drives that use the 4k sector size "Advanced Format". I'm planning to run NexentaStor on this hardware and want to ensure that I'm taking the 4k sector ...
0 votes
1 answer
1k views

Which HDD I can replace WDC WD20EARS with in the software RAID?

I have one customer's server with WDC WD20EARS drivers in a software RAID. These disks are of advanced format (4Kb sectors, not 512 bytes). They are configured as follows: Configuration: ...
0 votes
2 answers
3k views

RAID 1 disk is marked as Spare after replacement

one of two disks in my RAID 1 died so I replaced it. When new disk has been added to array the sync process started and few minutes later it has become a Spare. How can I "force" the disk to be a ...
2 votes
2 answers
2k views

aligning truecrypt partition on 1.5TB 4kB sector drive

Aligning partitions to start at real physical sector of ssds / stripped raids / 4kB drives is a 'good thing to do', but I've run into a problems when trying to do it for a truecrypt partition that ...
1 vote
1 answer
1k views

How to make partition, raid5 and filesystem on 6x2TB WDC-drives in Linux

I'm getting confused by this "Advanced Format" (4KB sectors) talk of bigger (2TB) drives - and I am wondering about how I would resolve this if I'm building a new software (mdadm) RAID-5 array. The ...
6 votes
2 answers
13k views

How can I set the disk partition alignment using linux tools?

After reading Disk Partition Alignment Best Practices for SQL Server, I just want to give those advices a try, but on my linux test server. What are the required parameters in order to set the ...
0 votes
2 answers
2k views

How to correctly partion WD "Advanced Format" drive (4k sector size) with Disk Druid?

Unaligned Advanced Format drives with sector size of 4k will have degraded performance. How do I make Disk Druid to partition drives correctly?