[parted-devel] 3TB drives available at retail; anyone tried parted with 'em?

[John Gilmore]

I received a 3TB Seagate drive today.  Due to PC-clone boot issues,
they don't sell it as an ordinary SATA drive, but you can buy the external
USB drive and merely take it out of the box.  It's $200.  See:

  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148580

I'm writing to suggest that parted developers consider getting
such a drive and testing with it.  It's the first ordinary SATA
drive holding more than 2TB.

Here's a review of the drive (both as a SATA drive and in its native
USB2 and optional USB3 interfaces):

  http://www.anandtech.com/show/3858/the-worlds-first-3tb-hdd-seagate-goflex-desk-3tb-review/

See in particular the section "The 2TB Barrier" which describes some
of the problems with MBR partitions, PC-clone boot roms, etc, that are
keeping these nice larger drives off the SATA drive market.  (I've
heard that 4TB drives are ready to go, except for these issues.)  The 3TB
drive apparently fakes 4K sectors in order to divide the MBR sector
numbers by 8, allowing >2TB to be addressed in 32 bits -- but it's
really a 512-byte-sector drive.

I was thinking you could manipulate the fake MBR at the front of a GPT
drive to useful effect, e.g. allowing an old BIOS to boot a GPT drive.
If you think so too, there's a great page here:

  http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/hybrid.html

about "Hybrid MBRs" and all the problems you can find with them.  (The
page also says parted wipes out any hybrid MBRs it finds, at least in
version 1.9.0; has that been fixed?)

Here's what the Ubuntu 10.04 Linux kernel (2.6.32-24-generic-pae) says
when I plug one of these in on USB:

[2509826.884084] usb 1-10: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 14
[2509827.017270] usb 1-10: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[2509827.019228] scsi20 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
[2509827.019596] usb-storage: device found at 14
[2509827.019603] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
[2509832.016322] usb-storage: device scan complete
[2509832.017081] scsi 20:0:0:0: Direct-Access     Seagate  FA GoFlex Desk   0155 PQ: 0 ANSI: 4
[2509832.018254] sd 20:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg4 type 0
[2509832.032135] sd 20:0:0:0: [sdd] 732566645 4096-byte logical blocks: (3.00 TB/2.72 TiB)
[2509832.032739] sd 20:0:0:0: [sdd] Write Protect is off
[2509832.032746] sd 20:0:0:0: [sdd] Mode Sense: 1c 00 00 00
[2509832.032751] sd 20:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through
[2509832.033620] sd 20:0:0:0: [sdd] 732566645 4096-byte logical blocks: (3.00 TB/2.72 TiB)
[2509832.034238] sd 20:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through
[2509832.034245]  sdd: sdd1
[2509832.042507] sd 20:0:0:0: [sdd] 732566645 4096-byte logical blocks: (3.00 TB/2.72 TiB)
[2509832.043095] sd 20:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through
[2509832.043104] sd 20:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI disk

Here's what parted (2.2) says:

$ sudo parted /dev/sdd
Warning: Device /dev/sdd has a logical sector size of 4096.  Not all parts of
GNU Parted support this at the moment, and the working code is HIGHLY
EXPERIMENTAL.

GNU Parted 2.2
Using /dev/sdd
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) print                                                            
Model: Seagate FA GoFlex Desk (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdd: 3001GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 4096B/4096B
Partition Table: msdos

Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
 1      28.7kB  3001GB  3001GB  primary

(parted) quit
% mount | grep sdd
/dev/sdd1 on /media/FreeAgent GoFlex Drive type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096,default_permissions)
% df | grep sdd
/dev/sdd1            2930255996    390704 2929865292   1% /media/FreeAgent GoFlex Drive

It apparently came partitioned as an NTFS drive.

	John