Early on I switched that drive with a 3TB WD Red, installed the 3TB-Bootloader-Fix and went on using the underlying debian squeeze without the excito-apps.
After encountering some limitations because of the old kernel, I switched to a custom image with a newer debian wheezy (MouettE's: http://forum.excito.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=4477)
But by now a problem has arisen, which is probably related to the default installation by Rescue-key:
Incorrect alignment
I realised that my root-partition was not correctly aligned to 4K-Sector boundaries.
My 3TB WD Red uses 4K-Sectors internally, but still exposes 512 Byte logical sectors to the filesystem.
In order to reduce the number of internal writes, you should align your partitions in such a way, that their starting sector (or block/LBA) is a multiple of 8. (512*8 = 4096).
Instead the first (root) partition starts at sector 34, right after the GPT-Header, which leads me to the next issue...
The secondary GPT-Header is destroyed
GPT has two Headers (which contains the partition table), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table
While the primary header is stored at the beginning, the secondary header is located at the very end of the drive. Its use is for restoring the primary one, in case it gets corrupted.
Problem is, that probably the Installer overwrites the secondary GPT-Header with the swap-Partition.
Here is how this probably happened:
The Installer first creates the ext2/3 root-partition with a size of 10GB starting from sector 34 right after the end of the GPT-header (which ends at sector 33).
This is probably due to the installer not respecting either the Multiple-of-8-rule or the standard 1-MiB-MBR-Gap (which is equal to 2048 sectors) almost every modern partitioning tool uses.
Afterwards it creates a small lvm-physical-volume-partition (+ maybe swap) and then extends its size to the maximum of the drive, thereby killing the secondary GPT-header.
This has also lead to me not being able reformat manually, since
- Gparted crashes when I try to read the device on a different computer via a SATA-to-USB-adaptor with the aforementioned corrupt-secondary-Header error.
- I would probably have to rewrite the bootloader, when I make changes to the partitions (e.g. delete and recreate one).
- get a correctly aligned root-partition
- restore the secondary GPT-Header at the end of the drive