Advanced Format 4k sector drive with LVM
 

So I finally bought an advanced format drive, the 2 TB Samsung f4. I will be using it on my slackware box, running slackware 12.2 with kernel 2.6.27-7. I intend to format the drive by hand with fdisk and start the first partition on sector 2048, or perhaps boot a livecd and format it with a newer version of fdisk or parted that will natively partition this drive correctly. My real question is, do I have to do anything special to add this drive to an existing LVM volume group? I'm thinking no, since LVM basically just breaks all your data into 4 MB chunks and spreads them across the pool of partitions you've defined, but I've found many conflicting opinions from searching google. To simplify things, I'm not using RAID of any sort, neither hardware nor mdraid.

Hi,

Once you have the partitions created, you pvcreate them and you should be able to extend the volume group with no problems.

What kind of problems were you thinking on?

best regards
jose

Just performance issues, like if you format one of these drives with a tool that's not aware of the 4k clusters and use the default settings. I didn't know if I need to do anything fancy with the pvcreate such as "–dataalignment 4096" that this guy mentions. I really don't think it'll be a problem since the PV lives on top of the partition, but just wanted to pick the brains of the community.

Wondering if you could share anything you found about adv. format drives w/ lvm
 

The title says it all, really. This is an old thread, but it covers just what I'm wondering. I'm off to buy a new HD as soon as I figure this out.

Thanks

I did just what I said initially and didn't have any problems. I partitioned it manually to align it correctly, then added it to LVM just like any other partition.