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Date:      Wed, 23 Feb 2011 09:37:05 -0600
From:      "Mark Felder" <feld@feld.me>
To:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: 3TB disc and block alignment
Message-ID:  <op.vrc4b1kd34t2sn@tech304>
In-Reply-To: <20110221161637.GR34314@home.opsec.eu>
References:  <20110217115653.GH34314@home.opsec.eu> <AANLkTi=QMXvFtTyY9BUGg56VtTuac3G_0LnXaVboJQQz@mail.gmail.com> <20110217124515.GI34314@home.opsec.eu> <4D5D1D10.7010000@digsys.bg> <20110217180140.GL66849@dan.emsphone.com> <20110217204643.GJ34314@home.opsec.eu> <37576665@h30.sp.ipt.ru> <20110221161637.GR34314@home.opsec.eu>

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On Mon, 21 Feb 2011 10:16:37 -0600, Kurt Jaeger <lists@c0mplx.org> wrote:

> Hi!
>
>> > Hmm, wasn't the issues with 3T drives, that they internally use
>> > 4K blocks and emulate 512 and that therefore 8 block alignments
>> > are an performance issue ?
>>

Hi guys,

I'd just like to jump on this train real quick since I have a related  
question with alignment.

I've been building new Virtual Machine templates lately because I recently  
learned that our SAN which we access over iSCSI uses 64K blocks and the  
default FreeBSD install starts a filesystem on sector 63 (512K sectors).  
This would be misaligned for most I/O transactions. As a result, I updated  
our internal documentation for FreeBSD standards to be 64K aligned by  
manually installing FreeBSD with GPT and making the FreeBSD-boot partition  
64K in size:


Fixit# gpart create -s gpt da0
Fixit# gpart add -t freebsd-boot -s 64K da0
Fixit# gpart add -t freebsd-swap -s 2G -b 2048 da0
Fixit# gpart add -t freebsd-ufs da0
Fixit# gpart bootcode -b /dist/boot/pmbr -p /dist/boot/gptboot -i 1 da0



At the time, the examples I found used -s 64K for the freebsd-boot  
partition which starts the next partition/filesystem on the next 64K block  
which would be aligned for our purposes. However, I have been seeing -s  
1024K or larger which is also 64K aligned, but just larger. Am I shooting  
myself in the foot by not going ahead and aligning with -s 1024K or -s  
2048K right now?


Thanks for your opinions,



Mark



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