[CentOS] RHEL/Centos6 handling disks w/4k sectors?

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 4:50 PM, compdoc <compdoc at hotrodpc.com> wrote:
>> the best write speed I can get is about 8MB/sec
>
>
> A while back I researched 4k sector drives since most new drives have them
> now. There is a problem with speed if you get the partition wrong.
>
> The answer seems to be to creating a partition with 1 meg of unpartitioned
> space preceding the first partition. This causes sector 2048 to be the first
> sector of the partition, and avoids the problem.
>
> Newer versions of gparted do this for you automatically when you use it to
> create a partition.

This turns out to also be a significant issue with RHEL/CentOS 5 and
virtualized OS images, where the upstream repository has 4096 byte
blocks, whether NetApp or some other architecture. NetApp images in
VMWare get.... unhappy if you use the standard allocated 63 blocks for
the BIOS and partition records. They're much, much happer if the
begging of the first logical volume begins at block 65, but there's no
graceful way to set this up in anaconda or most configuration tools.
You have to pre-script it with parted.