On Sun, Feb 07, 2010 at 01:42:18PM -0800, Mark Knecht wrote:
> OK - it turns out if I start fdisk using the -u option it show me
> sector numbers. Looking at the original partition put on just using
> default values it had the starting sector was 63 - probably about the
> worst value it could be. As a test I blew away that partition and
> created a new one starting at 64 instead and the untar results are
> vastly improved - down to roughly 20 seconds from 8-10 minutes. That's
> roughly twice as fast as the old 120GB SATA2 drive I was using to test
> the system out while I debugged this issue.
That's good to hear.
> I'm still a little fuzzy about what happens to the extra sectors at
> the end of a track. Are they used and I pay for a little bit of
> overhead reading data off of them or are they ignored and I lose
> capacity? I think it must be the former as my partition isn't all that
> much less than 1TB.
As far as I know, you shouldn't worry about it. The
head/track/cylinder addressing is a relic of an older day. Almost all
modern drives should be accessed via LBA. If interested, take a look
at the wikipedia entry on Cylinder-Head-Sector and Logical Block
Addressing.
Basically, you are not losing anything.
Cheers,
W
--
Willie W. Wong ww...@math.princeton.edu
Data aequatione quotcunque fluentes quantitae involvente fluxiones invenire
et vice versa ~~~ I. Newton
