On 14/10/10 02:27, Eugene Vilensky wrote:
> One more question...is there anything to be concerned about regarding
> on disk geometry or does the PERC do the right thing automatically
> when using OEM drives?
>    

Nearly all drives have 512byte sectors, so these won't be a problem.  WD 
have been shipping 1.5TB and 2TB drives with 4k sectors for a while, and 
Hitachi is now also (just) doing so.  In the case of the WD drives, they 
lie that they have a 512byte physical sectors, because if they don't 
various BIOS and software breaks (dunno about the Hitachis).

So, if you're using those drives, then the PERC had better align it's 
user-visible data on 4096 byte boundries, otherwise write performance 
will go down the toilet (unaligned write of 4k of data will result in 2 
reads and 2 writes instead of a single write).

Dunno if it does or not, I guess you could pull a drive an use dmraid to 
work out what it's doing (the RAID metadata it uses is an open standard).

Tim.

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