Hacking 4 TB Seagate / DIOS MIOS issues

[Elliander]

I received a response:

Hello Customer,

Thank you for contacting HGST Support Center

Unfortunately we no longer manufacture hard drives with 512K sector size, all drives now come as 4K.

They are a Western Digital company. Ironically, the person responding didn't seem to know the different between 512k and 512 bytes. Anyway, it's pretty much confirmed that no new hard drives of any size use 512 byte sector sizes and thus are physically incapable of supporting DIOS MIOS, but I know that some use 512 logical bytes right out of the box. I just can't seem to find out which ones. Still looking though.

 

[bobmcjr]

I received a response:


They are a Western Digital company. Ironically, the person responding didn't seem to know the different between 512k and 512 bytes. Anyway, it's pretty much confirmed that no new hard drives of any size use 512 byte sector sizes and thus are physically incapable of supporting DIOS MIOS, but I know that some use 512 logical bytes right out of the box. I just can't seem to find out which ones. Still looking though.

Devolution supports my hard drive, so clearly its a software issue with dios mios and not pure hardware incompatibility. I just wish I knew which library or whatever needs to be updated.

 

[Elliander]

Devolution supports my hard drive, so clearly its a software issue with dios mios and not pure hardware incompatibility. I just wish I knew which library or whatever needs to be updated.

Yes, it is the way DIOS MIOS was programmed. I know DIOS MIOS loads entire clusters into memory at one time so it's not like it can't be coded to work with 4k sector sizes. Maybe they will feel motivated to eventually support it?

I tried to pry more information out of those "technical support" people trying to find a drive I can buy, but they don't really know what they are talking about.

I asked:

"You mean 512 byte (not k) sector size, right? What about 512 logical bytes along size 4k physical? I know some companies are doing that for compatibility reasons, but again, I don't see any information about what drives might support that."

They answered:

"We only manufacturer hard drives with 4K sector size, we no longer manufacturer legacy hard drives. All HGST hard drives are now 4K physical drives."

I replied:

"Yes, yes, you said that. What about drives with 512 byte LOGICAL sector size on 4k Physical sector sizes."

*sigh*

 

[bobmcjr]

Interesting, here is what windows spat out about my seagate backup+:

Bytes Per Sector  :               512
Bytes Per Physical Sector :       4096
Bytes Per Cluster :               16384
Bytes Per FileRecord Segment    : 1024

I assume Bytes Per Sector means logical bytes. Yet, it still wont work with dios mios. I guess it doesn't like the clearly secondary, non active ntfs partition on there, idk. The fact that it refuses to give power to the hard drive is strange.

 

[Foxi4]

...you have a 4TB drive connected to your Wii? ...wow. That... must be a lot of games. You could store the entire Gamecube library on this and you'd have plenty left-over space foe Wii games...

 

[bobmcjr]

Could it be that these drives are usb 2.0/3.0 only and do not support usb 1.0 if thats what dios mios uses? Just trying to come up with ideas as to why my drive shuts off..

 

[Elliander]

...you have a 4TB drive connected to your Wii? ...wow. That... must be a lot of games. You could store the entire Gamecube library on this and you'd have plenty left-over space foe Wii games...

Well, I tried. Unfortunately, it didn't work out due to the 4k sector size. But yes, if it did work, I would have enough room to technically store every game every made for both the Gamecube and the Wii and enough room for all the Wiiware games too on an EmuNAND... Then again, I have quite a bit of media on the hard drive too.

Really though, one of the reasons I wanted so much extra space was to hopefully address the slow down I was getting with Uneek EmuNAND taking a few minutes to load. Apparently lack of free space was a possible contributing factor and I was hoping to be certain of that by having an entire Terrabyte left over for good measure.

Really, I didn't need more than 3 TB, but it cost me like $20.00 more to go with 4 TB instead of 3 TB so I figured "Why not?"

Interesting, here is what windows spat out about my seagate backup+:

Bytes Per Sector  :              512
Bytes Per Physical Sector :      4096
Bytes Per Cluster :              16384
Bytes Per FileRecord Segment    : 1024

I assume Bytes Per Sector means logical bytes. Yet, it still wont work with dios mios. I guess it doesn't like the clearly secondary, non active ntfs partition on there, idk. The fact that it refuses to give power to the hard drive is strange.

Interesting. I would have thought that with 512 logical bytes per sector yours would be compatible. I mean, the entire reason why they have logical sector sizes is for programs hard coded for 512 bytes per sector.

Have you tried setting both your partitions to primary? You can use any partition manager to set the secondary partition to primary, though I don't see why the NTFS partition would want to be Primary. I guess you use quite a bit of media too if you need an NTFS partition.

 

[Elliander]

Looks like Seagate isn't even selling any new drives with 512 logical bytes anymore. This response was quite a bit more knowledgeable:

Thank you for contacting Seagate Support.

I'm sorry to hear about the inconvenience you are having. I certainly understand how frustrating this can be and I will be happy to assist.

Unfortunately we don't have any software or option to create 512 byte partitions on a 4K sector drive. The hard disk drive industry is transitioning to larger physical sector sizes called Advanced Format. The default sector size has been 512 bytes since the advent of the personal computer.

Advanced Format sectors are also called 4K sectors, because each physical sector now holds 4096 bytes. While the physical size is 4K, the disk drive processor presents the data over the cables to the computer as ordinary 512 byte sectors. This is called 512 byte emulation, or 512e.

The operating system will run slightly faster if it is "aligned" to the Advanced Format hard drive. Reading data from aligned or misaligned drives is the same. Writing data to a misaligned drive is slightly slower.

Reading data accounts for the great majority of disk drive usage. During setup, Windows 7 detects Advanced Format disk drives and adjusts the partitions automatically for alignment; Windows XP does not.

Unfortunately we don't have anymore large sized drive that have 512 byte sectors since the most companies are moving to the new 4K sectors advanced format drives.

The last line about large size drives seems to suggest maybe some smaller drives could work, but I specifically asked them what the largest size they had which has 512 byte sectors so I interpret this response to mean that no new drives at all have 512 bytes.


From western digital they eventually just said they don't know what I am asking, but sent me this useful reference. An ebook explaining Advanced Format.

http://www.hgst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/3D2E8D174ACEA749882577AE006F3F05/$file/AFtechbrief.pdf

 

[Elliander]

Could it be that these drives are usb 2.0/3.0 only and do not support usb 1.0 if thats what dios mios uses? Just trying to come up with ideas as to why my drive shuts off..

I wouldn't imagine that USB 1.0 would be a problem. It would be slower though even if it did work. I wonder though if the transfer rate from USB 1.0 would be faster or slower than a normal disc read speed? Personally, one of the main reasons I use backup loaders (aside from the convenience of having them in one place) is the load times.

 

[Rydian]

You were told on the first page to get a smaller drive.

All the big ones are 4K. Go with a smaller drive and not only will it not have a need to have gone 4k at that size, but it'll likely be an older one before 4K had common support. I, for example, didn't even know about the 4K issue until I ordered my 2TB internal in September 2011.

Something in the 320-500GB range should be safe.

 

[Cyan]

At least you got a nice and full answer from seagate.

You could try to find someone selling an old external drive (sized up to 2TB).
I don't know if people care to sell them or keep them as backup storage.

edit: Or like said Rydian, small drives should be old enough, and big enough for GameCube games.

 

[Rydian]

Getting a 3'5" and putting a shell on it would likely be safer as far as avoiding 4K, since the 3.5" ones don't have as much of a need to use better technology to get higher capacities.

I've only confirmed up to 1TB being non-4K (emulation!) though, I don't know if there's any 2TB.

 

[duffmmann]

I have a 1.5 TB Toshiba drive and that works just fine. I've heard anything 2TB or less should be fine.

HOWEVER, I had a 1 TB Seagate Goflex drive that also wouldn't work with Dios Mios. I couldn't figure out why. Until someone suggested it may be the cable (it was a combo USB 3/2 cable), that I should try and find the strictly USB 2.0 cable and connect that to my Wii to see if that would work. I searched around on ebay, and was able to find the cable in question (cost about 20 dollars), when it arrived I gave it a go, and much to my surprise this actually worked. Now I don't know if this is the solution for you, but you are also using a Seagate drive, maybe this is indeed the same issue. Now, I'm not sure what your drive looks like exactly, but if it has the same type of connection in the back for the cable, then this may indeed be the product you need to purchase here (this is what I bought that solved my problem): http://www.ebay.com/itm/Seagate-STA...uto-Backup-Data-Transfer-Cable-/251269224972?

For those curious what happened to my old Seagate drive, I hacked my buddy's wii, and gave him a good deal on my old drive (After I copied all my old info to my new drive), because thats what friends do and I wanted more room as I was just about filled up on my 1 TB drive.

 

[PsyBlade]

in the long run all new harddrives will be 4KiB
the only sensible thing to do is updating the software to support it

 

[Cyan]

I remember someone tried to update DM(L) to use 4KiB. it's an hardcoded value so you can't support both at the same time. But I don't remember the result.
I think it wasn't a good result or else some users would still make mods of each DM releases.
You can search in the DM thread to find it.

 

[bobmcjr]

The only part of dios mios that mentions sectors is usbstorage.c
I found that wiiflow also uses a newer usbstorage.c with this:

#define MAX_SECTOR_SIZE                4096

Couldn't then dios mios' usbstorage.c be replaced with wiiflow's or some other usb loader's usbstorage.c? The functions would have to be renamed, but it might work. I might try compiling this..

 

[Maxternal]

I remember someone tried to update DM(L) to use 4KiB. it's an hardcoded value so you can't support both at the same time. But I don't remember the result.
I think it wasn't a good result or else some users would still make mods of each DM releases.
You can search in the DM thread to find it.

I think the result was it just didn't work. I'm not sure if he really knew what he was doing, though. Seem to remember he just saw #defines set to 512 with a name that sounded right and change it. There could be other parts of the code that needed adjusting, too.

 

[Rydian]

I can't even get the trunk to compile without edits. XD

 

[Elliander]

You were told on the first page to get a smaller drive.

...

All the big ones are 4K. Go with a smaller drive and not only will it not have a need to have gone 4k at that size, but it'll likely be an older one before 4K had common support. I, for example, didn't even know about the 4K issue until I ordered my 2TB internal in September 2011.

From what I was told by the hardware manufacturers, no drives are being produced at all with a 512 byte sector size. This actually makes sense though because they have to mass produce the platters so probably just shifted their stock pile of 512 byte sector platters to their smaller capacity drives until the platters were gone so I suppose it would be possible to find 512 bytes somewhere, but unlikely in anything new.

Something in the 320-500GB range should be safe.

Even if by some chance there are still some to find, the fact remains that my 1 TB I purchased before they shifted to 4k works fine. So why would I downgrade to 500 GB when I need more space (not less) and where there isn't even a likelihood of it working?

I remember someone tried to update DM(L) to use 4KiB. it's an hardcoded value so you can't support both at the same time. But I don't remember the result.
I think it wasn't a good result or else some users would still make mods of each DM releases.
You can search in the DM thread to find it.

Thanks, I did a search in that thread for "4k sector" and I did find a result here. Apparently the size of the files were too large.

I think the result was it just didn't work. I'm not sure if he really knew what he was doing, though. Seem to remember he just saw #defines set to 512 with a name that sounded right and change it. There could be other parts of the code that needed adjusting, too.

A thought on the results: Apparently part of the size increase was related to auto detection of the sector size and the size increase is related to why it failed. As important as auto-detection is, wouldn't it make more sense to snip out the auto-detection entirely? With no new drives supporting 512 bytes it seems like there would be fewer and fewer people with 512 byte drives. Sure, without auto detection someone trying to use a 512 byte drive would be met with a serious problem and it would be bad that they wouldn't really know the cause of it, but if snipping out that auto detection is the only way to make it work for 4k drives I don't really see an alternative.

Maybe there could be a separate DIOS MIOS install. The current version can detect a 4k drive and produce a message, so maybe have USB Loader include both a 512 and 4k version together, and have USB Loader handle the detection. It could have a toggle in settings to switch between 512 and 4k mode. That would in turn allow people to snip out the extra code for auto-detection and still maintain the ability for people of different hard drive types to use it.

in the long run all new harddrives will be 4KiB
the only sensible thing to do is updating the software to support it

I agree. Though the only question in my mind is the solid state drives. I thought flash memory was always a 4k sector size and always emulated 512 bytes. Though I imagine that even those would be updated to working entirely in 4k soon if not already.

 

[Maxternal]

...auto detection...

I would bet it would be more feasible to just have a 512 sector version and a separate 4k sector version. I kinda think the first failed attempt was just that, though, a hard coded 4k sector size. Can't remember exactly, though.