Date: Mon, 02 Mar 1998 02:28:39 GMT From: jak@cetlink.net (John Kelly) To: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> Cc: scsi@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: timeout when formatting 9GB Barracuda, scsi errors is missing time Message-ID: <34fd0d61.25989081@mail.cetlink.net> In-Reply-To: <199803012121.NAA09745@dingo.cdrom.com> References: <199803012121.NAA09745@dingo.cdrom.com>
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On Sun, 01 Mar 1998 13:21:48 -0800, Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> wrote: >Er, rule 1: Do not perform a SCSI format on a disk unless you >absolutely *MUST*. Disks are formatted at the factory under optimal >conditions. You can't reproduce those anywhere else. The last 16 SCSI drives I've bought are all hard sectored. You can't reformat them to a different sector size, even by using the SCSI utility to change the mode page entry for sector size and low-level formatting. It will just ignore your saved value and use the default. And the drive's firmware will *not* let you flag the mode page for soft sectoring. I know, I've tried. I did this with one Micropolis 8.7GB drive, trying to change the sector size to 2048 bytes. After reformatting, FreeBSD reported that it was a 33GB drive! Wow! Too bad the sectors were still really only 512 bytes. :-( I expect most drives sold in the PC marketplace nowadays are probably all hard sectored. The worst you can do by reformatting them is perhaps reallocate some bad sectors and/or tracks, which is a good thing. -- Browser war over, Mozilla now free. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-scsi" in the body of the message
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