[arch-general] 4k sector drives

[Marti Raudsepp]

On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 2:37 AM, bardo <ilbardo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Great to hear that this has changed. :)

> 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.

I run weekly SMART "long" tests on all my disks because, in my
experience, that has been the best indication of impending disk
failure. It performs a full surface scan, so on a 2TB disk this can
take 6 hours (maybe more on green disks).

Something like this in smartd.conf:

/dev/sda -a -H -l error -l selftest -f -m marti at juffo.org -s L/../../3/11

checks for attribute changes and performs a long test every thursday
(3) at 11 o'clock and emails me about problems.

Regards,
Marti