I recently got one of those 3 TB disks to put in my Lynn Hayes box.

For anybody considering doing the same, I offer some advice based on my experience.

First, let me say that so far it seems to work fine. There is so much room, and I can use it for other backups as well.

Step one: update your tools. Lynn Hayes has older versions of boot loader, fdisk, gparted, etc. Maybe the best thing to do would be to get the arch Linux live cd ROM. One problem is that the documentation and steps that you read on the web don't match the versions of tools that you may be using.

Step two: go to this website and read about partitions. (He wrote gdisk.)

http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk

Mbr partitions can only extend to 2 TB, so for anything larger, it is best to use GPT partitions.

Step three: because these new discs use 4096 physical blocks, but present themselves as a regular 512 byte block device, it is important to have all the partitions start on a logical block boundary which just happens to be a multiple of 4096 bytes. So, for example, you could start a partition at 0, 8, 16, 24, etc.

What did I do?

I downloaded a gpart live disc (not quite right) and tried to use that to partition the new disk. However, even the current disk has old software. I used gdisk, but it was version 0.51, and it did not know about aligning partitions on eight block boundaries. So, I got a spreadsheet, and I think I partitioned it correctly. First, all the programs start partitions at block 2048, by default, so I did too. I created:

One. 200 MiB partition. efi

Two. A partition for Lynn Hayes (10 GiB).

Three. A swap partition.

Four. A partition for arch Linux (25 GiB).

Five. A partition for the rest of the disc (2.9TB).

I also left some space (128MiB) after partitions as detailed here:

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/ ... index.html


Partition number four is so that I can have an up to date arch Linux system someday. The system runs off of a 500 GB disk. And of course, important things are backed up on both discs.

The other issue to be aware of, is that the Western Digital disks parks its heads after about 8 seconds, which in the linux environment means it keeps waking up. Western Digital on their website says that this should not be a problem until about 1 million head parks, but many people believe it is excessive and should be addressed. Right now I just have a script which calls a smartclt -i and then sleeps for 6 seconds. There is a DOS utility which runs with Free dos and can modify the firmware on the disc so that it does not park the heads so eagerly. I will do this someday. It is late.

To add to this, just yesterday I upgraded my two (2) 640GB data drives with 2TB Seagate drives that also have to align on 4K blocks.

In my system I have an 80GB boot drive so it was just a matter of formatting the new drives copy across the data and then checking permissions.

I used the latest verion of Knoppix boot CD to do the "heavy lifting" and to prepare the disks I used this command:
Where sda is the appropriate drive.

Then I used gparted and formated the drives aligned on MiB. Copied my data across and then put the new drives in the system, checked the permissions and away I went, so much space and no configuration changes excepted for changing the UUIDs in /etc/fstab.

Reference: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-4kb-sector-disks/

_________________
Girkers

I hope in the future they will make gdisk, grub2 available in the repositories. The present and future disks are already beyond the MBR partition table's abilities. So, having gdisk, grub2 in the repository would be useful today.

I wonder how current the packages will be in the next release.

Hey luxluthor,

I do not know whether I understood your posting the right way. Are you able to boot LinHES from your 3TB drive? How did you do the setup of LinHES?

Thank you!
Regards, Jan

_________________
Shuttle SN68PTG5, AMD Athlon 64 5200+, HD 2TB Seagate, Hauppage Nova-T USB-Stick, Technotrend IR Receiver, LinHES 6

NO booting yet.

The current version of Linhes has no tools to support booting from a gpt partition.

The next version (7?) should, and it should be out any day soon. So I will wait.

I boot from a 500 GB disk, and use the 3tb for media + backups + etc.

damned ...

thanks for the information!

did anybody test 7.00.03 for this?

_________________
Shuttle SN68PTG5, AMD Athlon 64 5200+, HD 2TB Seagate, Hauppage Nova-T USB-Stick, Technotrend IR Receiver, LinHES 6

I partitioned my 3TB USB WD drive using a very recent version of gpartd, booted from a gparted-live USB stick. I am running LINHES 6.04 on my myth box.

rsync'ing a networked drive to the USB drive (connected to my LINHES 6.04 box) runs at ~5MB/sec. rsync'ing the same file to the internal 2.5" SATA drive run at ~9MB/sec. I am wondering if I am having alignment problems. The outcome from fdisk -l shows the folllowing:




It looks to me like the system recognizes the drive as having 4096 sector size. I would assume this means that everything is properly aligned to prevent performance issues caused by alignment problems, but perhaps I am confused.

Any thoughts or insights would be appreciated. I am using LINHES 6.04.

_________________
Marc

The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.