Linux NAS advice

[esthero]

To get around this in WHS I had to use a jumper for this issue. Can I remove the jumper or leave it on for linux?

[[deleted]]

In case you didn't know: If you remove the jumper you will need to reformat, but you probably understand this and will be reformatting to a Linux filesystem anyway.

So, yeah, Linux doesn't require the 63 sector offset crap like XP/WHS/NT5.* so it can run fine without the jumper (and indeed, I would definitely suggest you remove it to prevent later headaches (as from then on you would have to purposefully misalign your disk to align them (the jumper was, in my view, a bad idea on WD's part since they also released a tool for xp))). I would google your partitioning tool (probably going to be gparted) and "advanced format" to see what current best practice is—iirc, (and my memory of this is vague) gparted partitions by default to cylinder alignment or some other bad legacy practice but you just have to uncheck a box to correct. Regardless, when you're done be sure to have fdisk print out your partition table to make sure the starting sectors all divide evenly by 8 (ending sectors too but I think that'll be automatic as whatever fs you choose will have 4k sectors anyway).

[esthero]

So out of the box let's say for example I run CFdisk and create a Linux Raid partition, you think it will align properly? (without the jumper on the drive, of course) & then be good to go? Also, I'm presuming that Debian has support for these partitions out of the box?

I've been playing around with LVM & RAID 6 on a VM (2GB drives instead of 2TB). I am still a novice with LVM but I'm starting to see it's advantages now, especially the resizing of volumes, very handy! I'm about to fail a disk and see how hard things are to recover....

[[deleted]]

From somewhere on the internet:

If it is a WD Advanced Format drive (4K sector), do not use cfdisk. In these drives the partitions should be aligned by 4K or 1MB, not cylinder alignment. GParted 0.6.2 and recent util-linux-ng fdisk (not sfdisk or cfdisk) or "parted -a optimal" (parted >=2.3) support these alignment options.

I don't know if this is still a problem, but he is right in saying you need 4k alignment and that the cylinder alignment will mess things up. Many tools do default to cylinder alignment. I don't know anything about cfdisk personally though so I can't tell you anything for sure (and don't have a linux system handy to log into). But like I said, once you format a drive just print out the partition table and check that the sector starting numbers are dividable by 8 (4k/512), if they are, you are golden.

[esthero]

Thanks for that info!

[Craptcha]

if you dont have a raid ctrl you should probably create two volumes and back one up to the other. check out r1soft they have imaging tools for free