On Sunday 25 April 2010 12:46:56 Solor Vox wrote: > By the way, > > Some of the slowdown could be due to a "workaround" in Ubuntu for > ext4.
I wasn't using Ubuntu and I wasn't using ext4. Steve's suggestion of the OS using 512b blocks and the drive having 4096b blocks sounds like it could be the problem. The drive reports its sector size as 0 rather than 512 which is the first indicator, # hdparm -i /dev/sda | grep SectSize RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=50 and my first partition doesn't fall on a 4k boundary. (parted) print Model: ATA WDC WD8088AADS-0 (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 809GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 32.3kB 10.7GB 10.7GB primary ext3 2 10.7GB 21.5GB 10.7GB primary reiserfs 3 21.5GB 32.2GB 10.7GB primary 4 32.2GB 809GB 777GB extended 5 32.2GB 43.0GB 10.7GB logical linux-swap 6 43.0GB 809GB 766GB logical ext3 When I have a moment I will try repartitioning on 4k boundaries and see if that fixes the problem. Wayne
