New HDD not shwing as AF/4k

[John Smith]

Sorry for my first post being a call for help, but this is driving me mad.

My original HDD for my Humax HDR Fox T2 starting showing signs of failure. With this giving me the perfect opportunity to upgrade, I swapped the old for a WD20EARS Green HDD from Western Digital. Having initially used WDidle3 to change the head park times to 300 seconds, I thought I was good to go.

I simply swapped the HDD and allowed my Humax to format the drive (as I have 1.03.12 / 3.03) and all was good once I downloaded the webif. Wanting to confirm I the Humax was going to make full use of my HDD which has the Advanced Format sectors, I checked with 4kalign to be shown:

>>> Beginning diagnostic 4kalign

Running: 4kalign

--> This is a Standard Format drive.

Model Number: WDC WD20EARS-00MVWB0
Logical/Physical Sector size: 512 bytes

Disk /dev/sda: 2000 GB, 2000396321280 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243201 cylinders, total 3907024065 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 8 2104510 1052226 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 2104512 3886043166 1941969330 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 3886043168 3907024062 10490445 83 Linux


Standard format drive - partitions are always aligned.


>>> Ending diagnostic 4kalign

Certainly not what it should be, so I paid a bit more attention to this post: 2TB_Disk_Installation_Blog and carried all the editing thinking I had missed something out. This being the result:

humax# tune2fs -l /dev/sda2
tune2fs 1.42.10 (18-May-2014)
Filesystem volume name:   <none>
Last mounted on:          <not available>
Filesystem UUID:          cd2f8131-0710-4572-b436-de72e3288c0a
Filesystem magic number:  0xEF53
Filesystem revision #:    1 (dynamic)
Filesystem features:      has_journal ext_attr resize_inode dir_index filetype needs_recovery sparse_super large_file
Filesystem flags:         signed_directory_hash
Default mount options:    user_xattr acl
Filesystem state:         clean
Errors behavior:          Continue
Filesystem OS type:       Linux
Inode count:              1896576
Block count:              485492331
Reserved block count:     0
Free blocks:              485138787
Free inodes:              1891253
First block:              0
Block size:               4096
Fragment size:            4096
Reserved GDT blocks:      908
Blocks per group:         32768
Fragments per group:      32768
Inodes per group:         128
Inode blocks per group:   8
Filesystem created:       Sun Oct 25 11:11:32 2015
Last mount time:          Sun Oct 25 13:58:41 2015
Last write time:          Sun Oct 25 13:58:41 2015
Mount count:              9
Maximum mount count:      -1
Last checked:             Sun Oct 25 11:11:32 2015
Check interval:           0 (<none>)
Reserved blocks uid:      0 (user root)
Reserved blocks gid:      0 (group root)
First inode:              11
Inode size:               256
Required extra isize:     28
Desired extra isize:      28
Journal inode:            8
Default directory hash:   half_md4
Directory Hash Seed:      3615db13-5f5b-41ec-8980-011b108e7a1f
Journal backup:           inode blocks

My concern is that I am not getting the most form my Advanced Format HDD, and that it is simply not performing as it should be.

Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

 

[Black Hole]

I'm not clear what you expect to achieve, even supposing there is something that can be optimised. The maximum storage you can expect (unless you go for an exotic cluster size) is 2TB, which appears to be what you have (more or less), and if the drive is working fast enough to support multiple HiDef streams there seems to me little or nothing to be gained by fiddling further (other than to assuage a desire to fiddle). The phrase "don't fix what ain't broke" comes to mind.

If you wish to exercise your current setup to confirm it is up to standard, see here: Commissioning an HDR-FOX (click).

 

[prpr]

Sorry for my first post being a call for help, but this is driving me mad.

What is?

--> This is a Standard Format drive.

So it thinks it's standard format. So what are you worrying about?

/dev/sda1 8 2104510 1052226 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 2104512 3886043166 1941969330 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 3886043168 3907024062 10490445 83 Linux

The partitions are correctly aligned even if it is a 4k drive, so what are you worrying about?

Certainly not what it should be, so I paid a bit more attention to this post: 2TB_Disk_Installation_Blog and carried all the editing thinking I had missed something out.

Nothing there will affect whether the drive is AF or not. It's all irrelevant anyway as the latest Humax firmware will set 2TB drives up properly, as it has done with yours, so what are you worrying about?

This being the result:
humax# tune2fs -l /dev/sda2
tune2fs 1.42.10 (18-May-2014)
Filesystem volume name: <none>
...

What about it?

My concern is that I am not getting the most form my Advanced Format HDD, and that it is simply not performing as it should be.

On what do you base this opinion?

 

[John Smith]

My concern is that it is telling me that my WD20EARS Green HDD (which is an Advanced Format drive) is only a "Standard Format drive" when it should be telling me that it is an "Advanced Format (AF) drive". A small thing reading over prpr's reply, it's just that it was seriously niggling with me. If all is well then I'll leave it at that.

 

[Ezra Pound]

My concern is that I am not getting the most form my Advanced Format HDD, and that it is simply not performing as it should be. . . Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

I have seen it reported that the:-
Model Number: WDC WD20EARS-00MVWB0 has a 512 physical sector size while the:-
Model Number: WDC WD20EARS-60MVWB0 has a 4096 physical sector size

 

[John Smith]

It is the WD20EARS-00MVWB0 I have, though it does say Advanced Format Drive, which then has an info box detailing how to get the most out of the drive in Windows XP. But then it wouldn't be the first time Westrern Digital have said one thing then done another (such as there Red drives not having head park times suitable for NAS drives).

 

[Ezra Pound]

There is a report HERE, (don't be mislead by the typo in the first post), towards the bottom of this link is :-

"As expected, there are differences in Advanced Format words 106 and word 209.
The 00MVWB0 drive has zeros for all the Advanced Format words, so it is unable to report its AF capabilities.
Words 117 and 118 indicate that the logical sector size is still only 512 bytes for both drives.

Word 106 for the 60MVWB0 drive indicates that the ratio of Physical sector size to Logical sector size is 8:1 (0x6003), meaning that the drive has 4KB physical sectors.

 

[xyz321]

I have a 2TB WD Elements AF USB drive which when I first bought it was showing 4K sectors. Sometime ago I repartitioned (and reformatted) the drive and from then on it has reported 512 byte sectors. I can not run 4kalign/hdparm on it (without removing it from its enclosure) since it is a USB drive. I assume that by repartioning the drive I have put it into a 512 byte sector emulation mode since I can't seem to revert it to 4k mode.

 

[cdmackay]

I have a 2TB WD Elements AF USB drive which when I first bought it was showing 4K sectors. Sometime ago I repartitioned (and reformatted) the drive and from then on it has reported 512 byte sectors. I can not run 4kalign/hdparm on it (without removing it from its enclosure) since it is a USB drive. I assume that by repartioning the drive I have put it into a 512 byte sector emulation mode since I can't seem to revert it to 4k mode.

Interesting; I have previously noticed that the same drive gives different results whether in an internal SATA socket, or in a USB external case, so assumed that it was the SATA-USB bridge in the external case that was "lying" to me. In particular, I noticed that the external case would report 4K for a disk that would normally pretend to be 512B.

 

[Black Hole]

There is supporting evidence for that - see Things Every... (click) section 12, under "Drives Larger than 2TiB".