February 4, 201313 yr Hi Folks, The new build is progressing nicely (thank you all for your help so far). I just wanted to make sure I'm doing the preclear correctly with my 3TB drives. I'm using the -A option to clear each drive as I assumed a 3TB Seagate is an "advanced format" disk and it also makes it use the 4K option. I'm hoping I didn't just waste all weekend clearing two drives "the wrong way". I read all the instructions, but they were a little thin on the -A and -a option. Your help, input and guidance is much appreciated.
February 5, 201313 yr Hi Folks, The new build is progressing nicely (thank you all for your help so far). I just wanted to make sure I'm doing the preclear correctly with my 3TB drives. I'm using the -A option to clear each drive as I assumed a 3TB Seagate is an "advanced format" disk and it also makes it use the 4K option. I'm hoping I didn't just waste all weekend clearing two drives "the wrong way". I read all the instructions, but they were a little thin on the -A and -a option. Your help, input and guidance is much appreciated. The use of the "-a" or "-A" option is completely ignored with drives over 2.2TB. They always are aligned on a 4k boundary and do not use an MBR partition except to appease older utilities. Instead, they use a GPT partition. (There is a "protective" partition put into the MBR starting on sector 1. with the full 2.2TB it can define utilized. Again, this is just so some older utility that reads the drive, such as "fdisk", would think the drive is entirely allocated.) So, with any drive > 2.2TB, there is no 'wrong" way to invoke the preclear script. The -a or -A options are silently ignored. You can supply either, or neither, and it will work just the same. Even though the drive says it is an advanced format, it still presents the logical blocks to the OS as 512 byte blocks. (Some things never change) The "advanced format" just means they put a checksum on the disk every 4096 bytes instead of every 512 bytes on the disk. Fewer checksums means more room for data. (I guess that is the advanced part... the marketing dept makes more of this than the engineering dept.) Joe L.
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