[vox-tech] hard drive light stays on? 4k sectors WDS10EADS

[Nick Schmalenberger]

On Sat, Sep 18, 2010 at 11:03:00PM -0700, Brian Lavender wrote:
> I put together an MSI Wind box at the beginning of the year with a Western
> Digital 1TB drive that uses 4kb sectors (WD10EADS). It seems that the SATA
> link fails to respond at startup (see below) and the drive light stays on
> after bootup.  Otherwise, things seem to work fine. I am not sure if the
> drive got mapped or formatted (however you say it) with 4kb sectors. It
> looks like the kernel messages is reporting 512-byte sectors. Any advice?
> 
> I searched Google and I couldn't seem to fine a straight answer, except
> for that some were not too happy with this drive.  How is I tell if I
> installed correctly for this drive? I am using Debian lenny.
>
I got 2 of the 1.5tb version of these drives, and the sector size
is this way too, I think its pretty dumb. Apparently ibm
compatible bioses can't handle any sector size but 512 bytes, so
the firmware will always say its 512 even though its 4096
internally, and you are just expected to make the partitions
aligned on a 4096 byte boundary, which seems to be painful and
annoying to do in fdisk or parted. Parted also likes to use
metric instead of binary prefixes which doesn't help at all. I
was trying to install centos 5.4 on the drives when I got them
about 6 months ago, and haven't played with them much lately.
Maybe parted or fdisk have gotten better since then about setting
the alignment?
Nick Schmalenberger