On Monday 08 February 2010 21:34:01 Paul Hartman wrote: > On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 12:52 PM, Valmor de Almeida <val.gen...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Mark Knecht wrote: > > [snip] > > > >> This has been helpful for me. I'm glad Valmor is getting better > >> results also. > > > > [snip] > > > > These 4k-sector drives can be problematic when upgrading older > > computers. For instance, my laptop BIOS would not boot from the toshiba > > drive I mentioned earlier. However when used as an external usb drive, I > > could boot gentoo. Since I have been using this drive as backup storage > > I did not investigate the reason for the lower speed. I am happy to get > > a factor of 8 in speed up now after you did the research :) > > > > Thanks for your postings. > > Thanks for the info everyone, but do you understand the agony I am now > suffering at the fact that all disk in my system (including all parts > of my RAID5) are starting on sector 63 and I don't have sufficient > free space (or free time) to repartition them? :) I am really curious > if there are any gains to be made on my own system... > > Next time I partition I will definitely pay attention to this, and > feel foolish that I didn't pay attention before. Thanks. >
I have similar disks in my new system and was lucky that I was still in the testing phase and hadn't filled the disks yet. After changing the partitions to start at sector 64, the creation of the RAID-5 set went from around 22 hours to 9 hours. I also get a much higher throughput (in the range of at least 4 times faster), so I would recommend doing the change if you can. I now only need to figure out the best way to configure LVM over this to get the best performance from it. Does anyone know of a decent way of figuring this out? I got 6 disks in Raid-5. Thanks, Joost Roeleveld
