4kbyte sectors on new disks

[Michael Butash]

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