Re: Best tool to partition Drives with new sector geometry - (WAS: Need Help with crashed RAID5 (that was rebuilding and then had SATA error on another drive))

From: Chris Murphy <lists@colorremedies.com>
To: Benjammin2068 <benjammin2068@gmail.com>
Cc: Linux-RAID <linux-raid@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Best tool to partition Drives with new sector geometry - (WAS: Need Help with crashed RAID5 (that was rebuilding and then had SATA error on another drive))
Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2016 11:50:38 -0600	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAJCQCtQAazjCmXfSgbcJNDxtM2pHRcqbmEo1j=Og-dQRPEAzaQ@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <e6180f36-f246-b4ad-ef53-8012e583b09e@gmail.com>

On Sun, Sep 18, 2016 at 11:13 AM, Benjammin2068 <benjammin2068@gmail.com> wrote:
> In a followup question to my arrays, I have a question about the new WDs with the larger sector size geometry but support 512B sectors.
>
> I bought some WD Reds (WD10EFRX) drives.
>
> When I let the linux "Disk Utility" (palimpest <- who the heck named that anyway?) do the RAID management with a new drive, it partitions on cyls and not sectors.
>
> So it makes a partition and then complains to me it's off by 512bytes which could affect performance.

This is one of the dumbest things, haha. I do not for the life of me
understand what distribution won't backport this, if they're unwilling
to put modern tools for modern hardware in their distributions. It's
one of the simplest, safest backports they could do and yet they
don't. Incredible to me.

Anyway, yeah partition with something not from the Pleistocene.
Seriously, it's that old, it's that much of a solved problem, for
probably 5 years, maybe even longer.

Any version of gdisk will do this correctly out of the box, so you can
just install that from your existing old distro presumably. And if you
can't, then get a recent live CD from pretty much anybody: Fedora 23
or Fedora 24 has gdisk already on the media, and its version of parted
and fdisk, also included, all do alignment to 4KiB sectors correctly.

Actually, on either Fedora live media version you can do

dnf install https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org//packages/blivet-gui/2.0.1/1.fc25/noarch/blivet-gui-2.0.1-1.fc25.noarch.rpm

Which is the current version, and it will work on F24 for sure and
maybe/probably F23 also. And dnf will sort out any additional
dependencies needed. It has a similar gparted style UI, but it will do
all kinds of wild things: mdadm raid, LVM raid, Btrfs. It'll create
the partitions, RAID, LV's, file systems, and it will discover things
already on the drive and properly wipe their signatures with a proper
tear down before creating the new things. So you don't end up with
crusty old stuff coming back to haunt you some other day.

-- 
Chris Murphy