October 19, 201015 yr Tom - The 3TB drives are starting to come out featuring 4K sectors. ReiserFS seems to run particularly poorly with 4K sectors due to the sector alignment (at sector 63). WD has a jumper setting on their current 2T model that invisibly (to the OS) aligns sectors on 4K boundaries and restores good performance. (New Samsung drives lack this feature and do not work well based on forum posts). Not sure if WD's trick is going to help with the larger drives. Hope unRAID will be enhanced in the near future to natively support 4K sectors and allow migration to the next generation of disk drives. (3T x 20 drives = 60TB!) Thanks!
October 24, 201015 yr The sector alignment issue should be solvable via software. I'm assuming it's being worked on. Larger drive support will require 64 bit unRAID.
October 24, 201015 yr The 3TB drives are starting to come out featuring 4K sectors. But the 4K sectors are NOT exposed to the OS, so there is nothing for unRAID to do about them. The drives are all doing 512byte translation.
October 24, 201015 yr ^^ So theoretically they should work out the box with unraid better than the 2TBs that were exposing the 4K sectors?
October 24, 201015 yr Author As I understand it, the sector alignment issue created when using 4k sectors causes extreme performance issues for unraid. The new Samsungs are basically unusable. The WDs have a jumper to force sector alignment, but not sure if this option will continue to be in place on 3T and beyond drives. Unraid should support these drives OOTB with good performance. This may require supporting an updated filesystem.
October 24, 201015 yr Isnt it amazing my first unRAID had 18 * 500GB drives cheweing up power. Now that can be done with only 3 drives each one using less power than one of my old 500GB drives.
October 24, 201015 yr Author Maybe not "now" but soon. It is amazing that we continue to see drive capacities go up by 50 - 100% year after year.
October 24, 201015 yr ^^ So theoretically they should work out the box with unraid better than the 2TBs that were exposing the 4K sectors? The 2TB dives did not expose the 4K sectors either... no drives have exposed the 4K sectors to the OS.
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