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

Mon Feb 7 06:05:57 UTC 2011
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On 2/6/11 3:30 PM, John R Pierce wrote:
>
>> Does anyone know if 4k sectors will be handled better by the kernel in Centos6?
>>     I'd like to copy backups to a 750Gb laptop type drive for offsite storage but
>> the best write speed I can get is about 8MB/sec even with dd to the raw disk
>> which shouldn't have an issue with partition alignment.
>
>
> what are you using on dd as the blocksize (bs=) ?   should be a fairly
> large multiple of 4K, like 1048576 (eg, 1MB writes).
>
> I get 50-80MB/sec writes to a laptop drive hooked up to my windows
> desktop when I'm cloning said laptop drives.   if you're only seeing
> 8MB, something is very wrong.

Not all laptop drives use 4k sectors - probably just 750Gb and up.

I was using obs=4M.  I thought there was more to it than alignment - and changes 
were made in more current kernels to help with the speed.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com