A-210 and HDD 4K alignement. Not working plus a request

[Fotis_Greece]

Brand new A-210 today and brand new sealed WD20EURS.
Installed disk, firmware update with latest 03-04-120807-21-POP-411-000 and fresh format NMT.
The result

Code:

Model: ATA WDC WD20EURS-63S (scsi)
Disk /dev/sde: 3907029168s
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags:

Number  Start     End          Size         Type     File system     Flags
1      63s       1975994s     1975932s     primary  ext3
2      1975995s  2988089s     1012095s     primary  linux-swap(v1)
3      2988090s  6907949s     3919860s     primary  ext3
4      6907950s  3907024064s  3900116115s  primary  ext3

I had to follow the wiki in my Linux workstation to get this

Code:

Model: ATA WDC WD20EURS-63S (scsi)
Disk /dev/sde: 3907029168s
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags:

Number  Start     End          Size         Type     File system     Flags
1      2048s     1974271s     1972224s     primary  ext3
2      1974272s  2983935s     1009664s     primary  linux-swap(v1)
3      2983936s  6901759s     3917824s     primary  ext3
4      6901760s  3907028991s  3900127232s  primary  ext3

So there is something wrong with latest firmwares.

Plus a request. Is it possible the add an option to menu to change the default value of system standby when pressing the off button on RC?
I would like to completelly poweroff-shutdown the unit with a simple power button pressing (important when used with wife and kids and trying to save some HDD life)

[halfelite]

With drives today that spin down on there own and usually park also you will have better HD life leaving it in standby rather then powering it up and down, But if you did not know you can hold power button for 3 seconds to power it down from the remote.

[bartvanl]

should´nt you use GPT as partition table?

[jonny555]

Yes use g parted to align the 4k Hdd ntfs format
And apps on USB is the best to avoid problems in
Future

[an1m8]

I also got this same problem. My old drive in my A-200 was giving out so a bought a brand new Seagate Barracuda ST2000DL003 2TB drive.

I read all the threads I could find on the Advanced Format issue and concluded the alignment should work out the box with the latest firmware which is what I was using.

So ran the NMT Setup Wizard successfully then swapped the disk to my PC and booted to Suse 12.1 ISO Rescue System to check it. Ran fdisk -l and got the same badly aligned partition settings reported by OP. fdisk also displayed a warning saying that the partitions were not aligned to physical sectors.

So as I'm typing this I'm going through the process of manually aligning the partitions.

So is this something that has just reverted to being broken in the latest firmware?

[accident]

I would guess broke. Someone would have to revert to an older and try it again to see what happens.

[corvus]

I have formatted my drive twice, with the 2011 firmware and the latest, according to the Windows method the partitions are correctly aligned.
Attach drive via USB, install ext2fsd, run msinfo32, divide the partition start offsets of the four partitions by 4096 and an integer number should result. Maybe fdisk has more stringent compliance criteria which must be fulfilled.

[accident]

It's an interesting finding. if the 4K alignment is for windows but hurts linux i would say the support isn't there yet because it is formatting it for linux usage.

I don't know enough about this subject to do anything but guess, is there any experts out there that can chime in what would be the proper way for linux usage and if the pch is not doing it.

[an1m8]

On drives with Advanced Format 4K sector size the start and stop sectors should be divisible by 8. This is the new sector size (4096 bytes) divided by the legacy sector size (512 bytes). Advanced Format actually allows any power of 2 sector size, but for now almost all drives are using 4096 which allows for drives up to 16TB.

When using Parted to re-align the sectors you can specify a custom alignment size but it defaults to 1 MByte (which is 2048 x 512bytes). Hence the re-aligned sectors have start and stop sectors divisible by 2048. This is overkill for fixing the problem, but that's OK.

The alignment issue has nothing to do with the OS. A drive has the same alignment requirements for Windows and Linux.

(09-09-2012 03:20 PM)accident Wrote:  It's an interesting finding. if the 4K alignment is for windows but hurts linux i would say the support isn't there yet because it is formatting it for linux usage.

I don't know enough about this subject to do anything but guess, is there any experts out there that can chime in what would be the proper way for linux usage and if the pch is not doing it.

[accident]

(09-10-2012 09:33 PM)an1m8 Wrote:  The alignment issue has nothing to do with the OS. A drive has the same alignment requirements for Windows and Linux.

Now actually read this thread and explain the results some are seeing a couple posts back.