Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Frank Steinmetzger <Warp_7@gmx.de>]

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Am Sat, Aug 20, 2022 at 05:45:18PM -0500 schrieb Dale:

> >> This new 10TB drive is maxing out at about 49.51MB/s or so.

For a new 3.5″ drive, I find this quite slow, even for the slowest part near
the centre of the spindle. I tend to use hdparm for a quick info, but that’s
been mentioned in another reply already.

> > I wonder if you are possibly running into performance issues related
> > to shingled drives.  Their raw capacity comes at a performance penalty.
>
> This drive is not supposed to be SMR. […] If you have a better source of
> info, it's a WD model WD101EDBZ-11B1DA0 drive. 

That’s a WD Red Plus. WD introduced the Plus series after the SMR debacle do
differentiate between the „now normal“ WD Reds which can (or maybe always)
have SMR and the Plus, which are always CMR.

> > Conceptually working in 512 B blocks on a drive that is natively 4 kB
> > sectors.  Thus causing the drive to do lots of extra work to account
> > for the other seven 512 B blocks in a 4 kB sector.
> 
> I think the 512 has something to do with key size or something.  Am I
> wrong on that?  If I need to use 256 or something, I can.  My
> understanding was that 512 was stronger than 256 as far as the
> encryption goes. 

Yeah, we are talking about two different kinds of blocks. You have the disk
block size, the encryption block size and the file system block size. (I
call them all block size here, but they may have more appropriate names).

I think the most important thing is to have the FS block size match the
drive, because in the end, the FS is what sends writes out. The encryption
layer is transparent underneath, it simply transforms the bit values, but
not their location. Disclaimer: that is pure speculation on my part based on
common sense.

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