2010/4/29 Caleb Cushing <xenoterracide@gmail.com>:
On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 9:22 PM, Marti Raudsepp <marti@juffo.org> wrote:
However, this WD disk crashed after barely 3 days of operation and I replaced it with a normal 512-byte sector Seagate.
eek! hope the ones I ordered today don't do that.
Just two days ago I built an Arch NAS/HTPC with two 2TB WD Caviar Green WD20EARS (the ones with 4k-sectors). I used the latest iso from build.archlinux.org, the one that Thomas suggested, and everything went happily fine. I used parted's interactive mode to partition, followed by mdadm and mkfs. Parted automatically warned me about an unoptimal sector alignment when I tried to put the first partition at 0 (the first partition should start at 2MB), but if you want to be extra-sure just check the the '-a optimal' parameter. About the disk reliability I can't tell much, but I already transferred some 100GB to it, and of course I had the first RAID5 build, which took a few hours and ran through the whole disk. Also, smartctl doesn't have anything bad to say. HTH, Corrado