Terastation Harddisk Layout (PPC)

(Information on this page currently for the 1 TB version.)

The TeraStation has four Western Digital 250 GB harddisks (WDC WD2500BB-22GUC0) on four IDE buses of a IT8212 type controller. (Reportedly there are also versions with slightly smaller Maxtor disks.) Each disk is partitioned approximately like this:


 * partition 1, 400 MB, RAID auto-detect
 * partition 2, 120 MB, Swap
 * partition 3, rest of disk, RAID auto-detect
 * partition 4, 200 MB, RAID auto-detect

The hd*1 partitions are joined via RAID-1 to make the 400 MB root filesystem.

In the RAID-5 layout, The hd*3 partitions are joined via RAID-5 to make the 700 GB RAID space.

The use of the hd*4 partitions is currently unknown. Maybe there is an emergency system stored there. Hm, unlikely:

Dec 12 13:48:40 LUXOR kernel: md: invalid raid superblock magic on hda4 Dec 12 13:48:40 LUXOR kernel: md: hda4 has invalid sb, not importing! Dec 12 13:48:40 LUXOR kernel: md: could not import hda4!

probably just unused (maybe the extra space that is not available on the Maxtor drives?)

The hd*2 partitions are activated as individual swap spaces during boot. There is a potential problem here; should one of the disks die while in use, the whole system is likely to crash because of inaccessable swap space.

hda                hdb                 hdc                 hdd --         --          --          -- |          |        |          |        |          |        |          | |  Part 1  ||          |        |          ||          |   Root FileSystem (400mb) |         |        |          |        |          |        |          | |--|        |--|        |--|        |--| |  Part 2  |        |          |        |          |        |          |   SWAP File       (120mb) |--|       |--|        |--|        |--| |          |        |          |        |          |        |          | |  Part 3  ||          ||          ||          |   User Data       (REMAININGmb) |         |        |          |        |          |        |          | /          /        /          /        /          /        /          / /          /        /          /        /          /        /          / |          |        |          |        |          |        |          | |          |        |          |        |          |        |          | |--|        |--|        |--|        |--| |  Part 4  |        |          |        |          |        |          |   Unknown         (200mb) |         |        |          |        |          |        |          |  --          --          --          --