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Linux Not Quite Ready For New 4K-Sector Drives
Theovon writes "We've seen a few stories recently about the new Western Digital Green drives. According to WD, their new 4096-byte sector drives are problematic for Windows XP users but not Linux or most other OSes. Linux users should not be complacent about this, because not all the Linux tools like fdisk have caught up. The result is a reduction in write throughput by a factor of 3.3 across the board (a 230% overhead) when 4096-byte clusters are misaligned to 4096-byte physical sectors by one or more 512-byte logical sectors. The author does some benchmarks to demonstrate this. Also, from the comments on the article, it appears that even parted is not ready, since by default it aligns to 'cylinder' boundaries, which are not physical cylinder boundaries and are multiples of 63."
Hi pot, enjoying calling the kettle black? Nice to see you criticizing people for "poor" research when you hardly done any yourself.
(a) Gentoo has no versions. Nor cutesy names like Ubuntu. It is a source-based distro and everything is compiled on installation so doesn't need this careful versioning nonsense.
(b) Speaking of Gentoo, this topic here has already had a nice long discussion on the Gentoo mailing list. In fact I dare to venture this is where the author of the article got his ideas. If you want data points: this thread has quite a few more.
(c) It is not just one version of fdisk on some backwater 15 year old distribution. On most modern distributions (check the fdisk man page yourself) fdisk defaults to aligning on cylinder boundaries. And it will complain slightly if you make partitions not beginning or ending on cylinder boundaries. The fault, however, really is two fold: one is historical, which we cannot do anything about, and the other is the fact that these new drives are effectively lying to the operating system about their disk geometry for the sake of "interoperability" with Windows XP.