Big Bad SATA

So Best Buy had the much maligned Seagate 7200.11 Barracuda 1.5 terabyte hard drive on sale for a mere US$130. Given a couple of Best Buy rebates, I just couldn't resist picking it up for just a little of US$120 - incredible! I immediately went to the Seagate page to see if my drive had a firmware update, but luckily(?) it didn't so I was all set to install it.

Man, I just love the SATA connectors! Gone are the days of bending one of the gazillion little pins, or, even worse, getting it plugged in backwards. And no more slave/master settings either. Slid it into my tower, plugged two small cables into it and fired up the machine. It was immediately noticed and so now I needed to figure out how to partition it.

I created one 650gb partition for backups. I really truly am going to get a backup strategy implemented, especially now that my wife has her own laptop and is working from home. I'm going to run a Bacula server on my machine and Bacula clients on my box, my work box (WinXP) and my wife's Vista laptop. So I want to have plenty of room for storing select backups. I created this as an ext3 partition, with no access time tracking (for performance reasons), using YasT2's very easy Partitioner.

The other partition was a little more problematic. I want it to be the home for all our media - songs, movies, pictures. And I'll run a media server here. I have had real good luck with Mediatomb but Andrew Wafaa convinced me to try Coherence, a true DLNA/UPnP framework. It looks pretty neat - great, just what I need another project!

I wanted my media partition to be readable by WinXP as well as my openSUSE (and, in general, Linux) boots. I just checked so I know differently now, but I also thought that sharing a volume via Samba would require it to be a Windows partition as well. Turns out, that is a by now obvious bad conclusion, as Samba will share Linux partitions just fine. But as I wanted to use it natively as well, I still needed a Windows partition.

I was shying away from an NTFS partition, as I just wasn't sure how stable the NTFS-3G implementation was, so I started with a FAT32 partition. The biggest drawback with FAT32 is its 4gb max file size. It is also, I think, less efficient than NTFS in its structure, so it would use more space for such a large (nearly 750gb) partition. Once again, the Yast Partitioner worked great and was nearly instantaneous for FAT32 (or vfat) partition.

Now I wanted to move my ripped music CDs over to the new "mediax" partition (I couldn't use /media, as KDE uses that). As I wanted to preserve the time information, I used rsync:

$ rsync -auv Music /mediax
[lots and lots of]
/bin/cp: preserving times for `/mediax/Music/podcasts': Operation not permitted

That was odd. So without thinking about it too much, I decided to take the plunge and try out NTFS, as openSUSE 11 comes with read/write support "out of the box". So I reformatted it as NTFS (after rebooting into Windows, as Partitioner doesn't format NTFS) and tried again.

This time, it worked pretty well. openSUSE uses the "standard" NTFS-3G driver. There is an odd caveat about a slowdown with Amarok, my prefer music player, but it seems to have to do with writing, not reading, which I don't do much, so no big deal.

But I ran into a problem because of my change of heart. Because I had originally formated it with FAT32 (vfat) using the Partioner in YaST (openSUSE's graphical admin tool), and because Partioner doesn't support NTFS formating, I forgot to change the /etc/fstab file, so on reboot, it didn't work correctly. I then compounded errors by changing the 3rd column to being merely 'ntfs', which meant I was still getting the weird cp "Operation not permitted" error, which had me really confused. But I checked out swerdna's page on using NTFS on Linux and finally the light dawned on Marblehead. I changed the filetype to 'ntfs-3g' and now all is good and I can use my music collection whether I'm in Linux or (shudder) have to reboot into Windows.