On Jan 8, 2013, at 4:13 PM, Ross Boylan [off-list ref] wrote:

I didn't mean that the disk changed its sector size dynamically, just
that, e.g., it might have physical sectors of 4k but report that it has
(logical) sectors of 512.

Reds are AF drives. Any 512e AF drive should be reported as having 512 bytes logical sector size, and 4096 byte physical sector size.

I'm not sure what you mean by the offset working.  I'm referring to the
fact that for some drives when you ask for logical sector n you actually
get physical sector n+1, n-2, or something like that.  This implies that
aligning on the logical sectors (meaning the ones the drive reports out)
might misalign on the physical ones.

There are some drives floating around that have a jumper switch, targeted at Windows XP and older, that will do an offset like what you describe. The jumper isn't enabled by default, and you don't want to use it.

quoted

So you just need to use a more recent partition tool and repartition the disks correctly.

Correctly = start at multiples of 8?

Don't think of it that way. You can come up with a partition sector start value divisible by 8 that is right in the middle of physical sector, which is what you don't want.

Recent partitioning tools (i.e in the last 3 years at least), do the right thing if you don't 2nd guess them. First partition starts at 2048. Specify partition sizes in MiB. Now you won't have a problem.

I thought 108 was the scaled smart score, which is between 0 and 255
with higher being better.  The raw value of 45 seemed more plausible as
an actual temperature, though I guess there's no guarantee of that.

Yes.

sdb and sdc have similar numbers for Temperature_Celsius.

On the logs and sign of disk failure, it's quite possible I don't know
what I'm looking for.  Given their size and the fact that the drive
failure seems clear, I think I'll  spare you all the gory details.

I think you just have the one disk that's giving you trouble.


Chris Murphy