Samsung EcoGreen F4EG

i wouldn't say the issue is with the drives. I'd say my issue is with the postage from Perth to Kalgoorlie.

I had them sent via mail to my home so i suspect the freight/postal company has been pretty rough with the drives considering i've bought 12 drives over the past month and 4 of them have had re-allocated sectors and multizone write errors.

 

Thanks for that young_einstein and MetalPhreak.

To update also: I've put 6 of these drives in a software Raid 5 under Linux and its working a treat. Nice and quiet drives!

I aligned them with parted, and double checked with the align-check statement inside parted. Seems to have worked a treat.

 

Ah well. I will grab 2 of these and see what happens. Hopefully they both pass, if they fail, RMA time

 

Whats this tool/software parted? I have 8 and just been working out the best way to setup solution. plus im still waiting for mini SAS cables. So far I have a 4 in raid 5 on ubuntu 10.10 setup and the other 4 in a freenas setup with raid 5. the freenas gave some strange bench with atto at the high end when the write speed just dropped 50% from 1024KG. will post pics later of bench

Thanks

 

Ubuntu 10.10 by default comes with parted 2.3.

Just run parted as root from the command line

use it create a partition by typing it mkpart

I prefer to use values of 1% and 98% as this seems to align very nicely on 2TB drives with 4k sector with 512B emulation.

 

I aligned each of my drives with the following commands, and then joined them into raid using mdadm:

parted /dev/sdb
mklabel gpt
mkpart primary xfs 1M 2001G
align optimal 1
set 1 raid on
quit

parted /dev/sdc
mklabel gpt
mkpart primary xfs 1M 2001G
align optimal 1
set 1 raid on
quit

.... so on and so forth for /dev/sdd, /dev/sde, /dev/sdf and /dev/sdg.

Now for raid:

mdadm --create /dev/md0 --chunk=64 --level=5 --raid-devices=6 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 /dev/sde1 /dev/sdf1 /dev/sdg1

 

Thanks for that. Im guessing that it would be better for me to kill and recreate my raid with the info above as all I did was create it the standard way with the GUI?

On thing that I have had trouble with also is getting the raid to auto start & auto mount when ubuntu starts. Got any hints on this.

cheers

 

open up command prompt.

type in sudo mdadm --detail

not down the UUID

type in sudo nano /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf

down at the bottom you need to add ARRAY and the uuid i beleive.

Once i get home i'll get it for you.

Also ensure that it's scanning all devices (uptop it should have DEVICES /dev/sda etc.... just put /dev/sd*

 

Why? I thought the whole point of UUIDs was to make mdadm work regardless of device letters.

My mdadm.conf hasn't had /dev/sd* in it for ages. I move drives around regularly and it never causes problems.

Code:

#DEVICE partitions
#MAILADDR root

ARRAY /dev/md1 metadata=0.90 UUID=85ca4ea4:f9d9095c:a2cbf81c:681b73dc
ARRAY /dev/md0 metadata=0.90 UUID=91f00ff6:3f4ec93c:a8c01ae6:dadc544c
ARRAY /dev/md11 metadata=0.90 UUID=51c27939:659215f0:b93bb673:258dbd1f
ARRAY /dev/md2 metadata=0.90 UUID=f63a907d:1b0dcd6f:a3e11ff6:c55c9d4e
ARRAY /dev/md5 metadata=0.90 UUID=d0560cd3:7cdc1289:72a195bd:6b70044c
ARRAY /dev/md7 metadata=0.90 UUID=f21a69a4:2701e851:e6c7942f:24d377fc
ARRAY /dev/md4 metadata=0.90 UUID=2344e84b:12b360c0:b93bb673:258dbd1f
ARRAY /dev/md3 metadata=0.90 UUID=ee7155fb:522c89ae:b93bb673:258dbd1f

 

Not sure oli, i was just following a RAID guide i found on the interwebs that was pretty darn good.

I would suspect so that you stop mdadm from trying to pickup hd partitions or scsi partitions.... *shrugs*

Anyway the actual line to add in is as below

ARRAY /dev/md0 uuid=4ab6153f:c90c2938:8d05582c:acb1c6e4

 

What's the benefit of putting a partition on them at all, if you are going to use the entire device in the raid?

None of my drives have partitions on them, and I just add them to an md-array as is (ie /dev/sda /dev/sdb etc).

No problems with alignment since it uses the entire drive from the very beginning.

 

Thanks. I have got it to auto start on boot. Now how to auto mount on boot. Or should what I have done do that aswell?

 

Add it to /etc/fstab

There's 101 guides to it on the internet

 

cheers. got it. after about the 10th go. kept on getting a error msg on boot. Had to skip as something i had was screwed.

As you know Im still noob on the ubuntu. I still got a long way to get this raid system running nicely. soo many other things to learn

 

Samuka pm me your email addy and i'll forward you the raid guide i found that you more than likely will find VERY useful

 

on the two new drives ES-Tool v3.01v passes them both without any errors

then tested them both again each with v3.00g and v3.01p, the AJ41 RAM error only came up when using v3.01p

for what its worth i would say the problem is with ES-Tool v3.01p, not with the drives

 

From all my reading on it, everybody seems to recommend creating a single partition and then using mdadm, instead of just using mdadm on the raw device. I'm not sure of their exact reasoning except for the one below.

I think by using the entire drive there could potentially be alignment problems because by default the "very beginning" of these 4K drives are considered the 63rd sector.

With parted, and by creating a single partition, you can start that partition wherever you want. Most information out there seems to say to start at the 64th sector since it's a nice multiple of 4096, while in my case I started at 1M (1024) which is also a multiple of 4096.

Without parted, we would need to use fdisk to create the partition manually and align it as needed. Although fdisk doesn't support the gpt partition table, so that kind of puts us back with parted.

My 2c worth - this is mostly what I've gathered from the various posts on here and articles online.

 

Can these drives be jumpered like the WD Green ones to fix up compatibility issues? If so I have a shitload of jumpers that people are welcome to for postage costs (65c ).

Hmm looks like you can't:

Source

 

Samsung EcoGreen F4 2TB HD204UI

These drives don't have shitty compatibility issues like the WD Green Drives do they, as I want to replace my Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB HD103SJ inside my media player.

(As in 4KB Physical Sectors instead of 512B?)

 

Yes, they have 4kb physical sectors as per this whole thread.