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Re: [LUG] Setting up new disk.

 

On Wed, 2010-04-28 at 17:20 +0100, Gordon Henderson wrote:
> On Tue, 27 Apr 2010, John Williams wrote:
> 
> > I've just ordered up a couple of new HD's. One is a second 1.5TB HDD
> > which isn't really any hassle. The other though is a super duper SSD, an
> > Intel X25-M (or something like that)
> >
> > I've been doing some reading up in readiness and just wanted a couple
> > things clearing up.
> >
> > I have looked around for info and seen that I should align the
> > partitions before formatting it, using this page as a basis :
> > http://forums.extremeoverclocking.com/showthread.php?t=333059
> >
> > I'm unsure if this step though:
> > # fdisk -H 224 -S 56 /dev/sdx
> >
> > and is cfdisk mentioned as an alternative easier to use than fdisk for
> > someone unfamiliar with either?
> 
> I use both - cfdisk is my prefered one.
> 
> > Do they open interactively to configure the partitions I want ?
> 
> cfdisk is curses/screen based. fdisk is some of commandy like.
> 
> > Forgive me but despite the few years using linux as my sole desktop I
> > haven't used fdisk to partition with, we are mere acquaintances who
> > occasionally "fdisk -l" ;)
> >
> > I am equally unwilling to run that command right now, the day before the
> > new drives arrive to test anything that might send my data to digital
> > heaven ;)
> 
> They will both work on mounted and live disks, but are relatively safe if 
> you don't write anything.
> 
> On your new SSD, start with:
> 
>    cfdisk -z -h 224 -s 56 /dev/sdX
> 
> (You need to be root of-course)
> 
> However, to see what it looks like, try (again as root)
> 
>    cfdisk /dev/sda
> 
> You need to type a capital W to write it to disk, and even then, there's a 
> 'are you sure' prompt, so you should be relatively safe.
> 
> For your new SSD, you probably just want one partition - that's easy to 
> do.
> 
> As for that alignment thing - ignore it for the spinny drive - the reason 
> it's there for the SSD is to try to force the partition to start on an 
> alignment equal to the erase page size of the SSD. The theory being that 
> it will help to speed up writes to the disk, but you need to make sure 
> that you know what the erase page size it... This is assuming 128KB. Not 
> sure it's going to make that much difference for day to day use, but you 
> never know!
> 
> Gordon
> 

Thanks Gordon, it is all setup, aligned and everything. 

Like most things, it looks more daunting initially than the actual doing
of it. The SSD is in 3 partitions, 100mb /boot, 15GB /, and rest
is /home. Each partition start is divisable by 1024 in 128k blocks.

cfdisk is certainly a little simpler than fdisk, but neither were a
problem, I did try both while I had new drives to play with and my data
drives unplugged.. Much safer :]


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