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

[Mark Knecht]

On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 10:19 AM, Volker Armin Hemmann
<volkerarmin@××××××××××.com> wrote:
> On Sonntag 07 Februar 2010, Alexander wrote:
>> On Sunday 07 February 2010 19:27:46 Mark Knecht wrote:
>> >    Every time there is an apparent delay I just see the hard drive
>> >
>> > light turned on solid. That said as far as I know if I wait for things
>> > to complete the data is there but I haven't tested it extensively.
>> >
>> >    Is this a bad drive or am I somehow using it incorrectly?
>>
>> Is there any related info in dmesg?
>
> or maybe there is too much cached and seeking is not the drives strong point
> ...

It's an interesting question. There is new physical seeking technology
in this line of drives which is intended to reduce power and noise,
but it seem unlikely to me that WD would purposely make a drive that's
10-20x slower than previous generations. Could be though...

Are there any user space Linux tools that can test that?

The other thing I checked out was that when the block size is not
specified it seems that mke2fs uses the default values from
/etc/mke2fs.conf and my file says blocksize = 4096 so it would seem to
me that if all partitions use blocks then at least the partitions
would be properly aligned.

My question about that would be when I write a 1 byte file to this
drive do I use all 4K of the block it's written in? It's wasteful, but
faster, right? I want files to be block-aligned so that the drive
isn't doing lots of translation to get the right data. It seems that's
been the problem with these drives in the Windows world so WD had to
release updated software to get the Windows disk formatters to do
things right, or so I think.

Thanks Volker.

Cheers,
Mark