[GTALUG] MBR and GTP Drives
D. Hugh Redelmeier
hugh at mimosa.com
Mon Oct 9 16:24:01 EDT 2017
| From: James Knott via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
|
| On 10/07/2017 08:53 PM, Howard Gibson via talk wrote:
| > Best Buy offered me a newer Seagate at a slightly lower price but one
| > is claimed explicity to support Linux, and it supports some older
| > protocols. When I told the people at the store I wanted MBR, not GTP,
| > they just stared at me.
|
| That's proof store clerks are not allowed to know what they're talking
| about. What does a disk drive care about what OS is on it? All it does
| is read/write data from specified locations on the disk.
The PC world is full of hardware and software of various levels of
conformance to various "standards".
As a consequence, when someone builds a new component, they often try
to trick old components into working. These tricks can sometimes be
indistinguishable from bugs.
Here are some such HDD tricks that I remember:
- jumpers to have drives report smaller capacity to overcome OS or
BIOS limitations
- ATA drives that will pretend to have any geometry (picked from some
clues during booting, I think). Of course they actually had no
geometry
- "hybrid" drives (HDD with modest SSD cache) that "knew" OS disk
access patterns and allocated SSD to match
- drives with 4k sectors that faked 512 sectors (to various extents)
to allow old BIOSes to boot from them
- drives that claimed their on-disk cache was flushed before it was.
But I don't remember any disks that were not supported by Linux.
More information about the talk
mailing list