partition and format a advanced format drive
 

Hi,

I have a advanced format 2tb drive. Now i want to partition and format the drive via the terminal. If i'm correct if you want optimal speed the partitions should start at multiples of 4096 bytes. Also i thought you need parted to partition and not fdisk. I only have experience with fdisk. I'll use a Red Hat 6.3 derivative (ClearOS). How is this done or can you link me to a how-to?

Hi:

Did some searching for you.
I have never performed this task. Have experience with only fdisk like you.


http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1159699
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/27...oning-internal
http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=73287
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php?topic=104677.0
http://askubuntu.com/questions/32094...-2tb-hard-disk


Hope this helps.

You only need parted for partitioning when you want to use the newer GPT standard and not the older MBR standard for the partition table. GPT is usually only needed for disks larger than 2TB, so you can simply use fdisk here.
And yes, you are right, the partitions should be aligned to the physical sectors (4096 bytes), but fdisk counts in sectors with 512 bytes size. So you will be fine if the sector size can be divided by 8, usual values for the start of the first partition are sector 64 and sector 2048, the latter just for convenience because it is also compatible to SSDs, which have similar alignment issues, but with larger blocksizes.