Re: Using a 4TB SATA disk with i386?

["Jonathan A. Kollasch" <jakllsch%kollasch.net@localhost>]

On Thu, Nov 02, 2017 at 05:56:07AM -0700, Andy Ruhl wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I have a NetBSD 6.1 i386 system I need to modernize.
> 
> I tried plugging in a 4TB USB disk a while back and found "it doesn't
> work" without doing something extra. What exactly that is, I'm not
> sure yet.
> 
> It's time to replace my SATA disks because they are pretty old, but
> it's not clear to me how to make a 4TB disk work. I have been reading
> various stuff, including man pages and mail list archives, but I'm
> surprised there's no clear instructions in the guide.
> 
> Did I miss something?
> 
> My plan is to install new disks and then at some point upgrade the
> rest of the hardware (motherboard, memory, etc), and migrate to a more
> current amd64 level.

USB disks are sometimes special, and not just because they're often not
as high of grade as the internal disks.

It's not uncommon for newer USB drives to present themselves with 4KiB
logical sectors, despite the fact that the disks within are actually
4KiB physical sectors with 512-byte logical sectors.  Some of our tools,
particularly back in the netbsd-6 days, do not deal well with
non-DEV_BSIZE logical sectors.

You should have little to no issue with internal SATA drives, as most
of them present themselves with 512-byte logical sectors.

	Jonathan Kollasch

P.S.

Also, sometimes these external drives even (de)scramble the data as it
traverses the USB/SATA bridge.