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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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 ...
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votes
4answers
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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, ...
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votes
1answer
2k 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 ...
5
votes
1answer
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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 ...
0
votes
1answer
307 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:
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2answers
275 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
2answers
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 ...
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1answer
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 ...
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votes
2answers
10k 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
2answers
1k 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?
