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

[Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 1:13 PM, Frank Steinmetzger <Warp_7@gmx.de> wrote:
> Am Dienstag, 9. Februar 2010 schrieb Frank Steinmetzger:
>
>> I have reset sdb7 to use boundaries divisible by 64.
>> Old range            begin%64  size%64  New range            begin%64
>> size%64 813113973-976703804  0.8281    0.125    813113984-976703935  0
>>    0
>>
>> And guess what - the speed of truecrypt at creating a new container
>> doubled. With the old scheme, it started at 13.5 MB/s, now it started at
>> 26-odd. I’m blaming that cap on the USB connection to the drive, though
>> it’s gradually getting more: after 2/3 of the partition, it’s at 27.7.
>
> I fear I'll have to correct that a little. This 13.5 figure seems to be
> incorrect, in another try it was also shown at the beginning, but then
> quickly got up to >20. Also, a buddy just told me that this 4k stuff applies
> only to most recent drives, as old as 5 months or so.
>
> When I use parted on the drives, it says (both the old external and my 2
> months old internal):
> Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
> So no speedup for me then. :-/

Frank,
   As best I can tell so far none of the Linux tools will tell you
that the sectors are 4K. I had to go to the WD web site and find the
actual drive specs to discover that was true.

   As far as I know so far there isn't a big improvement to be had
when the sector size is 512B.

- Mark