Thursday 8 April 2010

...4096 - the number of the beast...



I went through a bit of a 'mare trying to get the credit sequence out of a backup tar I had. Forced me to buy a new case (cooling) and PSU and a 1TB drive - which I'm going to start using as removable eSATA cartridges - at £57 for 1TB - far cheaper the RDX, and no restoration process - I'm not going to even bother making tarballs anymore...

...but the drive was one of those Western Digital 'EARS' Advanced Format drives. It clearly states on the packet:

"All other OS configurations - drive is ready for use as is"

Well, It looks like the firmware lies about the type of drive it is...and, older version of fdisk and parted don't know about 4k drives anyway. So had to download an ISO of the GParted live CD and boot from that - then repartition the drive with a GPT partition map, and a sector start point of 40....

I seems to be working. I was getting 60-70MB/s on a write operation!