WD has finally released a 3T drive employing 4K sectors and Advanced Formatting. I have some questions about Linux / RAID compatibility. The compatibility chart says using the drive with Linux requires employing the included HBA. Is the HBA really required if the system will not be booting from the drive? Why? What is the minimum kernel version required? I am wanting to use these on a RAID6 array with no drive partitioning underneath the array (raw disks) using md / mdadm. I'm using a pair of PM based eSATA RAID enclosures to house the drives, so if I need to replace my adapters, the replacements will need to have eSATA ports (at least 4 per card) compatible with PM enclosures, which the included HBAs do not have. I'm not sure if the little Sil3124 adapters I currently have will fill the bill. Performance is not a big issue. In addition, I am going to need to add capacity to my existing arrays well before I have the money to replace them completely with 3T drives. I'm going to need six 3T drives per array to completely replace the 1T and 1.5T drives currently in use. In the mean time, I could upgrade the existing arrays with 1T and 1.5T drives, but that money would be more or less wasted when the drives are replaced in a few months. I would much rather buy a couple of 3T drives and move them over to the new array when it gets built. Will there be an issue with attempting to add a 4K sector drive to a RAID6 array built out of 512 byte sectors? -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
