looks to me the WD is more in need of reformatting than the Seagate, especially for 4k blocks. You could set the filesytem label with fdisk without affecting anything, but it wouldn't fix the 512byte logical blocksize the drive is reporting. Most modern drives now are 4k physical sectors, using 512 is going to result in reduced performance + life, so you want to reformat to 4k as soon as possible. It was also necessary to align to the 4k boundary, but I believe fdisk/gparted does it automatically now. Disk /dev/sdf: 2.7 TiB, 3000558944256 bytes, 5860466688 sectors Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes On Mon, Jan 7, 2019 at 10:06 AM J C Nash <profjcnash [ at ] gmail [ dot ] com> wrote: > I recall reformatting the Seagate not long after purchasing. Got lazy with > the > WD, but will at some time do this (carefully!). Given the cost of disks > today, > if I value my time, I'll probably just buy a new one and format it right > away > then copy. > > Best, JN > > On 2019-01-07 9:59 a.m., Dianne Skoll wrote: > > On Mon, 7 Jan 2019 09:54:13 -0500 > > J C Nash <profjcnash [ at ] gmail [ dot ] com> wrote: > > > >> The "mount" information says Seagate is ext4, but fdisk thinks its > >> dos. Controller circuitry in the disks for the USB perhaps? > > > > No, it's not a hardware issue. "fdisk" reports partition types and those > > are just hints. I don't believe Linux actually cares about the partition > > type; you can have a DOS partition type formatted as an ext4 file system > > and Linux will be perfectly happy to mount it as ext4. > > > > However, take a look at this mount output: > > > >> /dev/sdf1 on /media/john/RedWD3T type fuseblk > > > > fuseblk is a user-space file system driver used to mount NTFS or other > > filesystems. Being user-space, it's going to be really, really slow. > > > > If you can do so without losing data, I'd repartition and reformat the WD > > disk to be a native ext4 file system. > > > > Regards, > > > > Dianne. > > >