I just bought two of the WD Green 500GB drives to be used in a hardware RAID (Adaptec 2610SA, aka Dell CERC SATA1.5/6ch) on my Ubuntu-based server. I was going to format it in ext3. Will this problem affect me?
You should be immune. It seems that only >640GB drives have this problem. See the affected drives.
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/advancedformat/
WD Align software aligns partitions on the Advanced Format drive to ensure it provides full performance for certain configurations.
Yes, certain configurations: XP. According to WD, Linux is not affected by this (but that's been proven to be false).
I'm happy to see that you saw the stalling disappear as well, it gives me confidence about the cause.
Time will tell if the the lock-ups were caused by the 512b partitioning (I wasn't able to repartition my drives until a few days ago), but it's a bit reassuring to know that I wasn't the only one experiencing these annoying as fsck freezes.
The affected drives on my end are WDC WD10EACS-00ZJB0 and WDC WD10EADS-00L5B
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It looks to me that this should *really* be fixed by WD with a firmware update
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Solution: Instead of fdisk, call it as fdisk -H 224 -S 56 as per Theodore Tso's blog.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian' -- AC
FYI (in case you didn't know (or care)), this was originally said by Mark Pilgrim.
IIRC, the first three numbers could be anything, and the other 7 digits, when added together, had to add up to a multiple of 7. 123-0000007 also worked.
There used to be two types of MS keys, three digits-seven digits and four digits-eight digits.
For both of those types, the keys that worked were 123-1234567 and 1234-12345678.
I'll have to try 123-0000007 and 1234-00000008 at some point though just to see if that would work...
Windows doesn't look like Windows 3.11 anymore, but this default theme still does. That's an easy fix that should be included in the next version.
I'm sorry but WHAT part of that looks like Windows 3.1?
The rule on staying alive as a forecaster is to give 'em a number or give 'em a date, but never give 'em both at once. -- Jane Bryant Quinn
