On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 4:15 AM, Per Jessen
Greg Freemyer wrote:
The partitioning seems a little odd - the first partition starts at 2048s, which is 2048 512-byte sectors, so at 1048576bytes.
That is the default alignment of parted 2.2. It's a feature.
Okay. With 3Tb who cares about 1Mb ... :-) The remaining three partitions all start on a sector# that is a multiple of 8, so that seems fine.
A lot new high capacity drives actually have 4 KB physical sectors and 512 byte logical sectors.
Yes, as does this one.
Therefore parted 2.2 was updated to interrogate the drive for the physical sector details and ensure partitions start on physical sector boundaries.
Once the drive is formated the alignment is set, so you don't have to worry about it.
Assuming your drive has 4KB physical sectors, you will want to ensure you only partition it on 11.3 or newer. If you did it with 11.2 or older you would see a horrible performance drop due to all the read-modify-write cycles introduced by non-alignment of pages.
Or use a suitable parted?
If and only if you have a current enough kernel, libraries, etc. I think the disk topography patches went into 2.6.32. If so, 11.2 uses 2.6.31 and won't have them. I know the standard 11.2 userspace does not have disk topography support. But you can always enforce the 1MB first partition offset and 4KB alignment on all others manually. Note, SSDs often want 128KB alignment for partitions due to Erase Blocks. (I'm not sure how important that is.) To get that right needs the same drive topography support as your 4KB physical sectors. Greg -- Greg Freemyer Head of EDD Tape Extraction and Processing team Litigation Triage Solutions Specialist http://www.linkedin.com/in/gregfreemyer CNN/TruTV Aired Forensic Imaging Demo - http://insession.blogs.cnn.com/2010/03/23/how-computer-evidence-gets-retriev... The Norcross Group The Intersection of Evidence & Technology http://www.norcrossgroup.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org