Am Sonntag, 7. Februar 2010 schrieb Mark Knecht:

> Hi Willie,
>    OK - it turns out if I start fdisk using the -u option it show me
> sector numbers. Looking at the original partition put on just using
> default values it had the starting sector was 63

Same here.

> - probably about the worst value it could be.

Hm.... what about those first 62 sectors?
I bought this 500GB drive for my laptop recently and did a fresh partitioning 
scheme on it, and then rsynced the filesystems of the old, smaller drive onto 
it. The first two partitions are ntfs, but I believe they also use cluster 
sizes of 4k by default. So technically I could repartition everything and 
then restore the contents from my backup drive.

And indeed my system becomes very sluggish when I do some HDD shuffling. 

> As a test I blew away that partition and 
> created a new one starting at 64 instead and the untar results are
> vastly improved - down to roughly 20 seconds from 8-10 minutes. That's
> roughly twice as fast as the old 120GB SATA2 drive I was using to test
> the system out while I debugged this issue.

Though the result justifies your decision, I would have though one has to 
start at 65, unless the disk starts counting its sectors at 0.
-- 
Gruß | Greetings | Qapla'
Programmers don’t die, they GOSUB without RETURN.