I intentionally partitioned my 3tb drives into 4x750G, and built 4 separate arrays out of it, and used LVM to make it one big device. #1: it allowed me to use 2x1.5tb in place of a 3tb for a while (I had the old 1.5tb ones) prior to me buying more 3tb ones, later on it allowed me to use those 1.5tb ones as emergency spares. #2: it allows me to resize the array 1 section at a time and a section takes less than a day to do. #3: when I have drive "failures" from either bad sectors or drive not responding (probably less than great cabling), it generally only kicks the disk out of 1 or 2 of the 4 sections. #4: It would also allow having a different number of devices in the different section. I did make an effort to creatively partition them and name them such that md14 had sd[a-h]4 in it and md15 *5, and so forth such that the madam commands were less complicated. Not sure if WD really though about it or not, they probably had some oddball reason for doing it. On Sat, May 16, 2020 at 8:20 AM Tim via users <users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Tim: > >> Though it can be surprising to find out how they've used a drive. > >> Such as a 4TB WD MyCloud that provides that 4TB using two 2TB > >> partitions on the *same* drive, using RAID to make them one 4TB. I > >> dunno why they'd do it that way. > > George N. White III: > > If you control the hardware you get more options. I've opened up > > dozens of older drives to destroy platters, and they all had one > > actuator shared by all the heads. Maybe the WD drives have two > > actuators, so are effectively 2x2TB drives on one case. > > Interesting. I hadn't considered that reason (although the drive does > look identical to any other hard drive in size and shape). It's quite > a quiet drive, too, so it doesn't sound like two mechanisms. Not > that's a very scientific assessment. > > I just guessed they were doing something oddball. Like a workaround > for a maximum partition size their software could handle. One day, if > I get the chance again, I'll see if I can jot down the drive model > info. > > -- > > uname -rsvp > Linux 3.10.0-1127.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Mar 31 23:36:51 UTC 2020 x86_64 > > Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. > I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list. > > _______________________________________________ > users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ > List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines > List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
