lol I think I missed out bigtime - I can't find anyone with any stock anymore. And I was going to purchase tonight!
Very true. There aren't any drive that report as 4kb on the market yet. The drives that user 4k sectors all tell the OS that they are 512b drives. This can be good for OS's that can't deal with native 4k drive. I think all windows versions fit this case. Or it can be bad for OS's that can work with native 4k drives. ie. ZFS's uses blocks that are a multiple of the sector size so the drive doesn't have to perform read, modify, write operations. However because the drive detects as 512 bytes ZFS will default to a zpool with blocks that may be an 8th of the sector size, leading to read modify writes.
You can force solaris based systems to treat drives that report as 512b as 4k by using a custom zpool program, see here. Use the custom zpool to create vdevs containing 4k drives that emulating 512b and the normal zpool for everything else. (Including native 4k drives when the appear.)
If you don't mind a bit of CLI work, then it shouldn't be too hard to get ZFS playing nice with a 4K drive: Code: for i in 0 1 2 3; do glabel label disk$i /dev/ada$i; done for i in 0 1 2 3; do gnop create -S 4096 label/disk$i; done This will create virtual devices on top of the actual drives which report the correct 4K sector size (assuming 4 drives). You'll have to set these for loops to run at startup. Then to create the zpool you would simply do: Code: zpool create tank raidz label/disk0.nop label/disk1.nop label/disk2.nop label/disk3.nop
they are a bit weird, I have had email responses saying mine is on hold due to not being able to confirm my address? I promptly replied with proof of the address I find it strange. It's already payed for so I really hoping it gets shipped today
Got my servers 1 from Dessy and 1 from Megabuy... now to configure... A little out of the loop with HDDs these days, but which are recommeded? WDs have served me well in the past, but hear Hitachi and Samsung are good these days? (Aren't Hitachi HDDs IBMs old HDD business... aka DeathStar's?) Want to load up 4x2TB drives, WD Greens ($90), or go for Samsungs ($110). Hearing lots about this Advanced Format? Any issues with that, apart from ZFS (plan on NTFS as will be media storage and want to play nice with WMC).
Looking at getting two of these 2TB Samsung Drives from MSY. Before I order, can someone please confirm that these will be suitable?
I will also be distinctly unhappy if they can't deliver, especially given I have a tax receipt showing that I have paid.
Not really NTFS has used 4k or multiple there of blocks since win2000, the only potential problem is block alignment. If your installing anything Vista or later this isn't an issue though.
