[CentOS] OT: AF 4k sector drives with 512 emulation

Sat Feb 28 08:08:14 UTC 2015
Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com>

On Sat, Feb 28, 2015 at 12:33 AM, Robert Arkiletian <robark at gmail.com> wrote:
> According to this pdf [1] alignment is important but from what I understand
> 512e emulation still has a small RMW performance hit from writes that are
> smaller than 4k or if the writes are not a multiple of 4k.

There shouldn't be writes smaller than 4KB since ext234, XFS, and
Btrfs all use 4KB block sizes. There is a possible case where the XFS
journal writes are 512 bytes, this can be fixed by specifying a 4KB
sector size at mkfs time if it's not auto-detected.

> Also it's probably not a good idea to mix 512e with 512n in a raid set.

Scrambled eggs mixed with yogurt? Offhand it doesn't seem like a bad
idea (won't kill me), even if it also may not be a good idea (sounds
suboptimal).

-- 
Chris Murphy