4kbyte sectors on new disks

[Eric Shubert]

On 10/19/2012 05:07 PM, Michael Butash wrote:
> I was curious if anyone else is using the new 4096 byte drives vs. the
> old/standard-for-ever disks effectively under linux?
>
> I've bought almost exclusively hitachi drives for years, but as far as
> smart reports I've had 2 separate disks recently almost immediately
> start throwing smart fail errors under ubuntu out of the retail box. One
> was a 3tb 7200rpm disk, and the other a 4tb.
>
> Obviously I'm not happy about this as neither were cheap, but the 3tb
> I'd *extracted forcefully* from an enclosure after working poorly via
> usb (ie. warranty went poof), but the second was a boxed retail disk
> from frys.  Not newegg oem's clanking against each other in transit in
> either circumstance so I'm not sure they were *both* broken.
>
> I've been occasionally using the 4tb as a temp disk for extracting very
> large files in sabnzb as a test, and smart is getting worse and worse as
> I do.  I eventually had to disable the alerts or come home to hundreds
> of them on my screen via osd-notify.  It will later show green again.  I
> really can't tell if it's false like a firmware bug or controller
> incompatibility issue.
>
> My caveat is I have a esata el-cheapo sil3132 card driving sata2 to it,
> so the disk is already running in backward compatibility, but I find
> nothing related to issues with this so far, and it's worked for years
> with old 512 byte drives just fine.
>
> Anyone run into something like this?  I'm intending to move and try it
> internal off an internal bridge interface, but I only have sata2
> available currently.  I have a new mobo with more sata3 that will allow
> me to try it on there too soon.
>
> Maybe my luck is just crap, but then again not everyone runs linux so I
> take it with a grain of salt as I don't see an outpouring of windoze
> users saying it too.  Maybe since acquisition by WD they have returned
> to the "deathstar" spin on the deskstar series.
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
> -mb

I would address this to the smartmontools mailing list:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki/Help#Mailinglist
They're very helpful with this sort of thing.

-- 
-Eric 'shubes'