| From: James Knott via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | | On 10/07/2017 08:53 PM, Howard Gibson via talk wrote: | > Best Buy offered me a newer Seagate at a slightly lower price but one | > is claimed explicity to support Linux, and it supports some older | > protocols. When I told the people at the store I wanted MBR, not GTP, | > they just stared at me. | | That's proof store clerks are not allowed to know what they're talking | about. What does a disk drive care about what OS is on it? All it does | is read/write data from specified locations on the disk. The PC world is full of hardware and software of various levels of conformance to various "standards". As a consequence, when someone builds a new component, they often try to trick old components into working. These tricks can sometimes be indistinguishable from bugs. Here are some such HDD tricks that I remember: - jumpers to have drives report smaller capacity to overcome OS or BIOS limitations - ATA drives that will pretend to have any geometry (picked from some clues during booting, I think). Of course they actually had no geometry - "hybrid" drives (HDD with modest SSD cache) that "knew" OS disk access patterns and allocated SSD to match - drives with 4k sectors that faked 512 sectors (to various extents) to allow old BIOSes to boot from them - drives that claimed their on-disk cache was flushed before it was. But I don't remember any disks that were not supported by Linux.