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

[Andrew Furey]

On 26/08/2010, Daniel Pittman <daniel at rimspace.net> wrote:
>  Anyway, you can check your partitioning by running as root:
>
>     sfdisk -ub -l /dev/sda   # read-only, I promise
>
>  If your start is '63' you have bad partitioning; if it is a multiple of 8 then
>  you are good.  Work that out before you worry further. :)

I worked on the following documentation:
http://www.linuxconfig.org/linux-wd-ears-advanced-format

This gives a more general (but technical) overview:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2888

The short, short version is that the partitions need to be positioned
so that their starting sector is divisible by 8 (8 x 512B = 4KB). In
my case, I have partitions starting at sectors 64, 1044288, and
98719488.

In my case, the simplest thing was to create the partitions at the
rough positions I wanted them, then view the partitions with "fdisk
-u" and round the starting sectors up to the next multiple of 8.

And yes, it does increase performance doing it right - in my case the
mke2fs etc time was halved...

HTH
Andrew

-- 
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