[plug] WD-EARS 2TB drives and linux?

[Steve Baker]

On 26/08/10 11:21, Ari wrote:
>  Hi guys,
>
> I think I may have made an error and I'm just now realising it. I have 
> two WD Greenpower 2TB drives - one as an encrypted backup drive (using 
> luks) and one as a storage drive (also using luks). I just fdisked 
> them and put them to work. Now I'm hearing I should have realligned 
> them or some such? I'm searching but not sure exactly what's up or if 
> it's even applicable to linux (using Fedora Core 11). Any help would 
> be greatly appreciated. The storage drive backs up onto a Seagate 
> external 2TB drive, and the backup drive is a backup of two 1TB 
> greenpower drives (I think). I'm freaking out just a little here about 
> terrabytes of data loss!
>
> TIA,
>
> Ari
Hi Ari,

New HDDs have a 4K block size, older drives used a 512b block size.  I'm 
not sure of the specifics, but I believe that older versions of Windows 
fdisk can put the start of a partition in the middle of a (4k) block, as 
it assumed that any 512 byte boundary would be fine (as it was on older 
drives).  This misalignment could cause significant performance problems.

Linux, and newer versions of windows (Vista, 7) don't have this issue, 
and place the partition on the block boundary where it belongs.

Regards,
Steve