Hi,

 

I am having an issue with two 1tb WD drives. I have a WD1001FALS (black 1tb) and a WD10EACS (green 1tb).  Due to the increased performance of the black drive I want to use it as my parity drive. The problem is that the black drive reports a size of 976,761,496 and the green reports 976,762,552.

 

I have read about the mysterious shrinking drive problem however I don't think this is the issue here. It may just be that for whatever reason the black drive ships with less usable space.

 

Is there anyway that I can run the black drive as my parity? Is it possible to reduce the size of the other drive?

 

I am running 4.5 beta6 PRO with 12 SATA disks on a gigabyte motherboard.Also I could not find a specific board for 4.5 so I am posting it here.

 

The Host Protected Area (HPA) is a common issue on Gigabyte boards and some others. 

 

The references you are looking for are:

 

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=UnRAID_Topical_Index#HPA

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=3865.0

 

These should get you going.

 

Rob

Is it possible to reduce the size of the other drive?

 

I don't think you really want to do that, but if you really do want to have a Gigabyte HPA installed on another drive in order to 'level' them, just make sure it is connected to an onboard SATA port and disconnect all other hard drives and reboot.  Gigabyte will probably oblige you.

Is it possible to reduce the size of the other drive?

 

I don't think you really want to do that, but if you really do want to have a Gigabyte HPA installed on another drive in order to 'level' them, just make sure it is connected to an onboard SATA port and disconnect all other hard drives and reboot.  Gigabyte will probably oblige you.

You should be able to use the "hdparm" command to set the HPA even if Gigabyte does not oblige you.

 

See here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=4194.msg37003#msg37003