On Sun, Mar 15, 2015 at 10:14 AM, Chris Murphy
'mke2fs /dev/hdb' results in ext2 with 4KiB block size, so that's the default for ~13 years. However, I was allowed to format with blocksize 1KiB and I could read and write to it. But I can't think of any reason why you'd do this on purpose.
The point of having a 4 KiB filesystem block size is to ensure that data is read and write in contiguous disk blocks. When Kirk McKusick was developing UFS, he noticed a performance hit of as large as 50% when parts of a file were not forced to be stored in adjacent blocks. Reading or writing from contiguous blocks from a disk is the fastest way to access mechanical storage. On the flip side, making the filesystem block size larger creates the issue of wasted disk space, so 4 KiB can be considered a reasonable tradeoff. Brandon Vincent -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org