Is F15 aware of Advanced Format HD's

[ltodd2]

Afternoon

Can anyone tell me if F15 is aware of the new Advanced Format Hard disks. The new dell laptop has one of these drives in it.
The reason for the question is the disk is a 250Gb but only seems to have 230ish available which does seem a lot to loose?

The dell website only talks about Windows and not linux. Below is from their site:

"In an effort to support higher capacity hard drives, the Hard Disk Drive (HDD) industry is moving towards Advanced Format (AF) HDDs with 4KB sectors to address the current limitations with the 512-byte sector HDDs.

The transition to 4KB sector HDDs will allow storage devices to more easily adopt larger capacities in both the notebook and desktop space.
While hard drives will transition to 4KB sectors and to maintain backwards compatibility, current Advanced Format 4KB HDDs, also known as 512e HDDs, will emulate 512-byte SATA communications to hosts and will operate at 4KB."

[jim1944]

You probably haven't lost anything. Hard drive manufacturers count differently than the rest of us. A 250GB drive has 250,000,000,000 bytes which, to us computer nerds, would be ~234GB (250,000,000,000/(1024*1024*1024)).

As to whether F15 will recognize your drive, try downloading and creating a live CD and trying it.

Jim

[marko]

The reason for the question is the disk is a 250Gb but only seems to have 230ish available which does seem a lot to loose?

ext3/4 file systems under Fedora lose a big chunk of space (5%, which is a lot with todays big drives) to the default root reserved space. Your missing 20GB is about 8% of 250GB of which 5% might be the reserve.
You can reduce that at anytime via the -r option under the tune2fs command (man page notes on -r and -l ):

-r reserved-blocks-count
Set the number of reserved filesystem blocks.
-l List the contents of the filesystem superblock, including the current values of the parameters
that can be set via this program.
To see your current reserved block count and size of a block (example /dev/sda1 on my laptop):

tune2fs -l /dev/sda1 | grep -i block
Block count: 512000
Reserved block count: 25600
Free blocks: 480105
First block: 0
Block size: 4096
Reserved GDT blocks: 124
Blocks per group: 32768
Inode blocks per group: 500
Flex block group size: 16
Reserved blocks uid: 0 (user root)
Reserved blocks gid: 0 (group root)
Journal backup: inode blocks
My 2GB /boot partition loses 100MB to reserve, if I don't want to lose that much I can do this even after the partition is formatted:

tune2fs -r 10000 /dev/sda1which reduces that to about 40 megs. The reserve space is drive space that the root user can depend on being available even if something bad happens like a program goes crazy and fills the disk up.

[stevea]

Advertized 250,000,000,000 = 232.83...*1024^3)


Linux has supported Advanced Format for some time, perhaps around F12 in Fedora.
I've never tried it, but you can google results.

You may need to use the UEFI instructions (see the release or installation notes) for creating boot media - but that's a different issue.

[ltodd2]

Thanks all 3 of you. I have installed F15 and it seems to be ok. Getting a few crashes in apps which is a bit worrying but will see how it goes. I compared the disk usage with a laptop of same speck but with windows 7 and that show the same amount of space.

Lee

[fpmurphy]

4K support was added in F15. See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/FourkBSectorBooting

[Luke M]

Advanced format drives use 4K sectors internally, but still present a 512 byte sector interface. No software change is required. Just need to make sure that the partitions are 4K aligned.