Chris Murphy wrote: <snip>
The emulation implementations don't come into play if the alignment is correct from the start. The better implementations have significantly less pathological behavior if alignment is wrong, but that's anecdotal, I don't have any empirical data available. But I'd say in any case you want it properly aligned.
You really, really want it properly aligned. We ran into that problem when we started getting 3TB drives a couple-three years ago. Proper alignment made a measured... trying to remember, but I think it was at *least* 20% difference in throughput.
Alignment's easy: using parted (the user-hostile program), if you do go in with parted -a optimal /dev/drive, and do mkpart pri ext4 0.0GB 100% (for non-root drives, for example), it's aligned correctly.
mark