Replace 500GB with 1TB

[Ben]

My current 500GB HDD seems to be dying and so I want to swap it out for a 1TB disk (easily enough space for me).

Do I still need to go through the faff of aligning sectors with a 1TB disk or can I just let the Hummy detect the drive and format it itself? I am running the latest Custom Firmware so hav access to gfdisk if I need it, but would rather an easy life

Thanks in advance.

 

[Black Hole]

can I just let the Hummy detect the drive and format it itself?

It depends whether the Humax is prepared to format it. If it refuses because the drive is too big, you have no choice but to prepare it manually.

 

[af123]

Do I still need to go through the faff of aligning sectors with a 1TB disk ?

If it's an advanced format disk, then yes, otherwise no.
Even on an AF disk you can get away without doing the alignment but won't get best performance.

 

[Ben]

Thanks! I'm looking at this drive which I believe is not AF: Seagate Pipeline HD ST1000VM002 - hard drive - 1 TB - SATA-600

 

[Cancunia]

I just installed a Seagate 1TB disk with no issues. According to the WebIf Diagnostics page it's a Seagate Pipeline HD 5900.2, model number ST31000424CS. It's a Pipeline disk which I got from a VM Tivo box on fleabay. Works fine and no bother to install, not sure how to check if I'm getting optimum performance tho. Your model number is different, but I'm not sure what the actual difference is.

 

[af123]

Thanks! I'm looking at this drive which I believe is not AF: Seagate Pipeline HD ST1000VM002 - hard drive - 1 TB - SATA-600

That's an advanced format drive - see http://www.seagate.com/files/staticfiles/support/docs/manual/ce/Pipeline HD Series/100633414f.pdf

For best performance and quietest operation you should align the partitions to 4K boundaries, however these drives have a technology called SmartAlign to handle partition misalignment conditions in the drive firmware, apparently without impacting on performance. They don't publicise how it works though - I manually aligned mine to be sure.

http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/whitepaper/tp615_smartalign_for_af_4k.pdf

 

[af123]

not sure how to check if I'm getting optimum performance tho.

If you're running CFW 2.15 then you could run the hdparm command from telnet to check whether it's an AF drive and whether the first logical sector has been offset by the firmware:

humax# hdparm -I /dev/sda

/dev/sda1:

ATA device, with non-removable media
    Model Number:       ST2000VM002-9UY166                      
    Serial Number:      xxxxx
    Firmware Revision:  SC01    
    Transport:          Serial, SATA Rev 3.0
...
   Logical  Sector size:                   512 bytes
    Physical Sector size:                  4096 bytes
    Logical Sector-0 offset:                  0 bytes

 

[Cancunia]

By coincidence my drive turns out to be the same model as the 1TB example in the Wiki at least according to the WebIF diagnostics. While surfing around I also downloaded the PDF for the drive specs, it's 512 byte sectors same as reported by the diagnostics page. Strangely enough the hdparm output is different in that I don't get a model number and the section with the sector sizes.

 

[af123]

Strangely enough the hdparm output is different in that I don't get a model number and the section with the sector sizes.

If you're running CFW < 2.15 or you aren't running the latest busybox package you won't get the new output.

 

[Cancunia]

Correct, am on 2.14. Will do the upgrade at the w/e time permitting. Smartctl from the command line reports as expected.