On 12/21/2010 01:39 AM, Per Jessen wrote:
Greg Freemyer wrote:
On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 4:15 AM, Per Jessen
wrote: Greg Freemyer wrote:
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.
Ah, I didn't expect it to be kernel-dependent, I would have thought parted could align the partitions quite well itself.
But you can always enforce the 1MB first partition offset and 4KB alignment on all others manually.
That is what I was thinking, and wouldn't a sufficiently up-to-date parted do that for me too?
With care and some manual intervention, it is possible to work with 4K-sector disks on older distros and kernels. I have one such system running openSUSE 11.1 and a 2.6.29 kernel. It mainly runs MythTV, and I have not found the time to upgrade it, and the WAF (wifely admiration factor) would greatly suffer if I broke it. She already thinks Linux is nonsense. As this drive was my second WD Green 1 TB drive, I did not expect any problems, thus I installed, partitioned, and formatted it normally. Only when the performance took a major hit did I discover the nuances of the model number. By manually partitioning and taking care that each one starts at a multiple of 8 of the simulated 512 B sectors, the drive works fine. Larry -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org