Mick writes:
> On Monday 31 January 2011 21:19:44 Alex Schuster wrote:
>> Now I'm really really sure there will be no problem. What I wrote above
>> about the gemotry is true I think, but all modern drives seem to have
>> 255 heads and 63 sectors per track, so they will be compatible.
>
> Does this also include the new 4096 byte sectors that (some) of the new 1TB
> drives have?
Ouch. Good point, Mick. I have no idea if this would be a problem. I'll
better make sure the new drive has the traditional block size.
I just heard that this Dell PC only supports up to 320G drives, but I
assume that means that Dell did sell them with this maximum capacity,
not that a larger drive won't work.
BTW, the PC only has space for one SATA drive. If the new drive would
also fit in, I could do the whole copy from remote, with minimum
downtime. But so the new drive has to be attached via USB first to clone
the original drive, and then it will replace it.
> TBH to avoid such conundrums I would partition the darn thing using parted
> with -a optimal option and then (s)tar/rsync the data into it. It will most
> likely be faster than dd in any case as blank space and sparse files can be
> easily taken care of with (s)tar/rsync.
But it involves much more typing than a single dd command. And more
things could go possibly wrong. There is not much free space on the
drive anyway, and no sparse files I know of.
And shouldn't dd be a little faster for a full drive because there is no
file system overhead, no seeking operations? In theory, dd should read
with maximum transfer rate as fast as the drive can deliver. But here we
have one USB drive, so things are slower anyway.
Wonko
