Mixing 512-byte sector, and 4096-byte sector drives

Hello,

I have a 6-drive RAID6 of WD15EADS (512-byte sector) drives. One of the drives is failing, and I have been forced to buy a WD15EARS (4096-byte sector) drive to replace the failing drive, and it has the new "advanced format" technology.

Do I need to set the "XP" jumper on pins 7-8 to play nicely with the other 512-byte sector drives in my array, or will mdraid be okay with the 4096-byte sector drive? Will there be a performance penalty adding the drive to my array?

Thank you,

-Peter

Did you create your RAID on the device or on a partition? If its on the entire device then you should be fine, tho this might depend on which metadata format you are using & where its located on the disc (not sure how the metadata effects data alignment). If you used a standard partitioning tool its likely your partitions start on sector
63. This can be confirmed via an fdisk -l on your other drives. If that's the case then you'll probably want to use the offest jumper. How the drive will behave with the others I have no idea. If after you add the drive and your write speeds drop dramatically then something is misaligned.

Wil

I created the RAID directly on the device, I have replaced the drive and the new 4096-byte drive seems to be playing nicely with the other drives in the array after the resync completed.

-Peter