Re: [gentoo-user] 1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? -> bar performance so far

[Valmor de Almeida <val.gentoo@gmail.com>]

Mark Knecht wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 11:39 AM, Willie Wong <wwong@math.princeton.edu> wrote:
[snip]
>    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 - probably about the

I too was wondering why a Toshiba HDD 1.8" MK2431GAH (4kB-sector), 240
GB I've recently obtained was slow:

-> time tar xfj portage-latest.tar.bz2

real    16m5.500s
user    0m28.535s
sys     0m19.785s

Following your post I recreated a single partition (reiserfs 3.6)
starting at the 64th sector:

Disk /dev/sdb: 240.1 GB, 240057409536 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 29185 cylinders, total 468862128 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xe7bf4b8e

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1              64   468862127   234431032   83  Linux

and the time was improved

-> time tar xfj portage-latest.tar.bz2

real    2m15.600s
user    0m28.156s
sys     0m18.933s


--
Valmor