[rescue] rescuing an ailing U10...

[Skeezics Boondoggle]

On Tue, 2 Oct 2007, Scott Quinn wrote:

> [...] I've heard
> that you need to watch out for disk array disks (especially EMC I
> think), one type uses a nonstandard block size.

Years ago I was able to pull old Seagates off an Auspex, plug them
into a Solaris box and use the appropriate Sun firmware patch to
re-flash and then re-format them.  They worked fine.  (Actually, I
then popped them into DEC StorageWorks cans and mounted them on a
NetApp filer, which then automatically re-flashed them again with
NetApp firmware!)   Nowadays you might run into drives formatted with
520-byte blocks that many arrays use, but I'm fairly certain they can
usually be reverted to 512-byte blocks through a reformat for use with
Solaris.

IIRC, the old NeXT formatter let you choose your block size on drives
that supported it - many NeXT disks used 1K blocks.  With high-end
servers sporting >1TB of physical RAM and many TBs (or even petabytes)
of storage these days, I find it strange that we still manage disk
space in .5K chunks, especially with such huge capacity drives...

-- Chris