Aligning partitions on a dynamic drive with mirror on windows 7?

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richms

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#177407 1-Aug-2015 16:03

Just realized that the reason 2 of my mirror sets on the external port multipllier are performing vastly worse than the other 2 is that they are not alligned to 4k.

I made them in the esata box which for some reason (either the box or the pcie silicon image card) hide the true sector size from windows, it just shows as 512 in the properties, so obviously windows would have had no reason to care about alignment.

Anyway, the other 2 sets which were made on the onboard controller and then moved to the esata box work a lot better, so I want to allign the patitions on the other mirror sets.

What software can do it even when the drive looks like its just a 512 byte sector size? Because it takes so long I dont really want to go playing around with all sorts of options.

Richard rich.ms

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#1358631 4-Aug-2015 12:36

Usually the HDD manufactureer will have an alignment utility. I had to do this with WD 2TB HDD's when I installed them in a Windows Home Server V1. The base OS - Server 2003, had no ability to read 4K sectors.

Or the HDD's themseleves will have a 4K/512b jumper, or a "compatibility" jumper.

richms

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#1359128 5-Aug-2015 10:28

Last I checked the tools from manufacturers were pretty basic and didn't deal with dynamic drives on GPT partitioned drives.

Have had yet another of the old 2tb drives fail so will probably buy another pair of 5tb ones and partition them on the onboard Intel controller and then move stuff over. Moving files is a pain with windows stupid path length limits so what I have done in the past is just pill one of the drives from the mirror and then add one larger drive as a new mirror and once it's re synced pull the other small drive and then enlarge partition and add the second new drive as a mirror. That's probably how I've ended up in this situation with a terrible performing mirror set.

Richard rich.ms

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#1359518 5-Aug-2015 16:30

richms: Last I checked the tools from manufacturers were pretty basic and didn't deal with dynamic drives on GPT partitioned drives.

Have had yet another of the old 2tb drives fail so will probably buy another pair of 5tb ones and partition them on the onboard Intel controller and then move stuff over. Moving files is a pain with windows stupid path length limits so what I have done in the past is just pill one of the drives from the mirror and then add one larger drive as a new mirror and once it's re synced pull the other small drive and then enlarge partition and add the second new drive as a mirror. That's probably how I've ended up in this situation with a terrible performing mirror set.

Yeah, GPT throws in another set of requirements, have stayed away from that for the time being.

But your method of enlarging your array sends shivers ... the risk of a failure means everything is lost.. may pay to backup all files extarenally, redo the mirror, put files back on. Surely you dont rely on the mirror as your only backup ?

richms

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#1359522 5-Aug-2015 16:36

Why does it send shivvers? I have the first drive I pulled from the array safe, the second one is cloned onto the new one as a new mirror, then I pull the second small drive out, another copy of the data, and then mirror the first big drive onto the second big drive.

Still have the data on the 2 small drives till I have done an SFV verification and stuff on the important things, then can re-purpose them. Usually the problems are just that one of the drives has too many duff sectors to keep working so gets kicked out of the array because windows mirroring is a bit dumb like that, most of the stuff is all fine and if anything is corrupted then I can pull important stuff off backups or in the case of things that I dont really care too much about like movies and tv shows re-aquire them from the origional source if they are still up there and re-check the torrent and it just pulls down the corrupted blocks.

Since moving off my old PCI based server I have not had any files corrupt up at all when checking them. Guess the old PCI silicon image cards were a bit crap.

Richard rich.ms