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Re: rsync seems to hang when asked to update backup of large disk

JN,

As hinted-at in the post from Raj, the modern-day partition utility is parted (cli). The GUI equivalent is gparted. You can query your drive with:

# parted /dev/sde p

If you do replace your disk, or repartition and reformat it, you will want to label it gpt, not dos.

(warning, dangerous,  data-loss etc)

# parted /dev/sdX mklabel gpt


Tim


On 2019-01-07 12:05, Raj wrote:
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.


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