[arch-general] 4k sector drives

[bardo]

2010/4/29 Caleb Cushing <xenoterracide at gmail.com>:
> On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 9:22 PM, Marti Raudsepp <marti at 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