Has anyone experience or can provide a link to information on performance impact with the new hard drives with 4 KB sectors when using file system with 1 KB block size?
My question is not about the alignment issue caused by physical/logical sector size of 4096/512 Bytes. I haven't yet played with that but I also wouldn't expect any problems here since 4 KB alignment should be easy to achieve. But I have a number of ext3 and ext4 file systems that use a small block size of 1 KB. This is because of the average small file size on these file systems, e.g. the news spool with an average file size of 2900 Bytes. Going to 4 KB block size would cause an increase of the internal fragmentation from about 15% to approx. 42% which I wouldn't like. But with a 4 KB sector size and 1 KB file system block size writing of a file might decrease performance significantly. When writing a file, e.g. with dd if=/dev/zero of=foo bs=2900 count=1, instead of writing 3 blocks of 1 KB, i.e. 6 sectors of 512 B, it would be necessary to read a 4 KB sector, modify 3 KB of it and write it back (assuming the 3 KB are in the same 4 KB sector, otherwise two reads and 2 writes would be necessary). Has anyone practical performance figures for such a scenario? urs -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/ygftyh7uopx....@janus.isnogud.escape.de
