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

[Ray Van Dolson]

On Sun, Feb 06, 2011 at 02:50:34PM -0700, compdoc 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.

Just did a SL 6.0 install on a machine with two Hitachi 2TB drives with
4K sectors.  parted warned me that the default values I'd chosen
weren't optimal for the sector size and I adjusted manually.

Note that I set these drives up post-install -- no idea if Anaconda
would have done the "right thing" or not.

Ray