I've read Ubuntu 10.04 and newer support the 4k sector HDD that WD, Toshiba, Samsung, Seagate are now manufacturing. I bought a Samsung F4 HD204UI 2tb. Its firmware does emulation of classic 512 byte sectors. I've tried installing 10.04 server and 10.10 server and both fail at 33% basically when trying to finalise the partitions. I've search on here and else where but documentation of install to 4k sector HDDs seems hit and miss. This is for my first home built NAS after getting fedup with the limitations of a Buffalo Linkstation.

Has anyone successfully formatted this drive with Ubuntu or any advice on how too ?

I think it will work just out of the box.

But I'd install only after updating the 204UI firmware. The original firmware has a bug that leads to data loss in a certain scenario.
Unfortunately the geniuses at Samsung left the firmware version number untouched in their fixed firmware.
So if you didn't update it already, there's no easy way of telling if your drive needs a firmware update.

Details: http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki/SamsungF4EGBadBlocks
Solution: http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/faqView.do?b2b_bbs_msg_id=386

-daflow