Frank Steinmetzger writes:

> On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 12:15:20PM +0200, Alex Schuster wrote:

The size of an erasable block of SSDs is even larger, usually 512K, it
would be best to align to that, too. A partition offset of 512K or 1M
would avoid this.

Unless the filesystem knows this and starts bigger files at those 512 k
boundaries (so really only one erase cycle is needed for files <=512 k),
isn't this fairly superfluous?

Yes, I think it is. When you search for SSD alignment, you read about this alignment all the time, even on the German Wikipedia, and many resources say that this can have a big impact on performance. But I could not find a real explanation at all.

Besides that, it's not so easy to do the alignment, at least when using LVM. I read that LVM adds 192K header information, so even if you align the partition start to an erasable block size of 512K, the actual content is not aligned. See [*] for information how to overcome this. That is, if you believe the alignment to erasable blocks is important, personally I do not know what to think now. It wouldn't hurt, so why not apply it, but it seems like snake oil to me now.

        Wonko

http://tytso.livejournal.com/2009/02/20/

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