DSM-G600, DNS-3xx and NSA-220 Hack Forum

If you agree, what Western Digital WD20EARS-00MVWB0 2000.4 GB is AFT drive, then I may say, what two such drives is RAID0 was initialised/formatted in DNS-323 rel.C1 firmware 1.0.8, survived flashing ALT-F and was converted from EXT3 to EXT4.
Sector size for me is unknown, I did not any magic tricks to format HDD. They just works.

voljka wrote:

I did not any magic tricks to format HDD. They just works.

You should do some research on the subject. Running AFT HDDs will cause you issues if you run Raid 1 unless you upgrade to firmware 1.10 and reformat the disks. If youj don't run Raid 1, then it is unlikely you will encounter the problem, but if it was me, I'd reformat with AFT support anyway.

@unmesh - Hopefully the DNS321 will have a firmware update similar to the DNS323 once they officially release 1.10.

Last edited by FunFiler (2011-05-11 02:59:57)

unmesh wrote:

voljka, FWIW, I jumped through hoops to force partition alignment on my WD20EARS (and avoid possible data corruption issues down the road) using a pre-1.10 firmware. It was painful enough that I decided to not buy any more AFT drives until they were natively supported by the Dlink firmware.

I do not understood all these fuss about 4k sector aligment. If this is purely performance issue, then I do not care, because DNS-323 has not anough power to suffer from it (IMHO).
Why are you care?

voljka wrote:

I do not understood all these fuss about 4k sector aligment. If this is purely performance issue, then I do not care, because DNS-323 has not anough power to suffer from it (IMHO).

You obviously have not read all the threads on the topic or you would care. It is not just performance, it is data integrity. If the performance was not affected, no one would have noticed any issues.

You can do whatever you want on your system, but the answer seems obvious to the rest of us.

Last edited by FunFiler (2011-05-11 13:39:53)

I have to say that the integrity argument sounds far-fetched to me as well.
I have two AFT (WD EARS) drives in standard mode in my DNS-323 and I manually formatted them to be 4K aligned.

Voljka,

These forums are always interesting places for discussion!

I'd read enough about data integrity concerns in the early days, both on earlier Linux kernels and on Windows Home Server (which I also have) to want to be careful. A few people reported errors only after their disks became relatively full. As others on this thread have said, data integrity is everything. I also remember a few posts with informed speculation about the mechanism for the data corruption but did not save the links.

dcx_badass,

I'm happy to do the experiment you suggest with a new AFT drive that I've ordered but it won't answer my question about native support. What it will do is to partition the drive correctly for the DNS-321 but I already know how to do that using a PC and it is not clear that this method is going to be that much easier with drive swapping etc.

So I formatted the drive and moved it to the other chassis where it seems to be recognized fine.

A couple of oddities worth mentioning.

The primary drive is a WD20EARS which is also 2TB but df shows a different number of formatted 1K blocks for the 2 drives:
Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
rootfs                    9911      6533      2866  70% /
/dev/root                 9911      6533      2866  70% /
/dev/loop0                4736      4736         0 100% /sys/crfs
/dev/sda2            1951684924 1578182684 373502240  81% /mnt/HD_a2
/dev/sdb2            1921832648    305768 1921526880   0% /mnt/HD_b2
/dev/sda4               497861     10715    487146   2% /mnt/HD_a4
/dev/sdb4               495884      2322    493562   0% /mnt/HD_b4

Also, the WD was manually aligned using the somewhat tedious process described in http://www.consumedconsumer.org/2010/06 … ii_08.html. The fdisk command downloaded from there does not recognize the partitions created by FW1.10B7 and neither does the one included in fun_plug.