Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2012 22:50:30 -0700 (MST) From: Warren Block <wblock@wonkity.com> To: "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg@tristatelogic.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Advanced Format Drive ? Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1211142231420.58597@wonkity.com> In-Reply-To: <17388.1352953630@tristatelogic.com> References: <17388.1352953630@tristatelogic.com>
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On Wed, 14 Nov 2012, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote: > (And I gather from everything that has been said > so far in this thread that if the alignment is set wrong, then the user > is likely to pay a Big Price in terms of performance, right?) Yes. > ... and I am almost tempted to file a formal PR about this, i.e. the fact > that ``guided'' partitioning doesn't allow the user to specify the alignment > of _anything_. There are a couple PRs like that already. >>> Or do I need to set the alignment separately, e.g. my manually running >>> bsdlabel? (Normally, I've just been using what noadays is being >>> called "guided" partitioning, you know, with the friendly curses-based >>> GUI. So As with fdisk, I have no real experience using bsdlabee from >>> teh command line. But I guess it is time that i learned how.) >> >> I don't know of a way to make fdisk and bsdlabel do the correct >> alignment. > > That also is rather entirely perplexing to me, especially given all else > that I have learned already from and within this conversation. fdisk and bsdlabel are old tools. Disks have had 512-byte blocks for a very long time. > For example, I've learned that when one is using modern "Advanced > Format) (4KB blocksize) hard disks, it is Bad (capital `B') to allow > any partition to be aligned to anything other than (at least) a 4KB > boundary, _and_ that newfs has already, apparently been modified/updated > so that it's minimum default fragment size is 4KB. The larger size was an option to newfs, the defaults have just been changed. > Given these facts, I am more than a little surpised to learn (or rather > just to realize) that the good old traditional fdisk and bsdlabel tools > do not have ways to explicitly specify minimum alignment _and_ that > these tools are still being distributed with FreeBSD. There may be a way, I haven't bothered to look. As I said, gpart does everything fdisk and bsdlabel can do.
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