How would I force Debian to use the physical sector size on a hard disk?
- by Confused User
I just purchased a few new 3TB WD drives. These have physical 4k sectors, but there is some sort of layer which is providing 512B logical sectors (see the partition table below).
In order to attempt to get some more speed out of my hard drives, I would like to get rid of this logical layer and actually use the physical 4k sectors. However, I can't figure out how to do this (or even if it's possible) from the man pages of fdisk and parted, or from searching Google. Does anybody know how this could be done?
As to why this is relevant, this page demonstrates that meerly aligning the sectors properly can already make up to a 25% speed difference for reads, and more than 2500% for writes in some cases! Getting rid of the logical sectors in favor of the physicals ones should improve speeds even more. Thanks!
$ parted /dev/sdc
GNU Parted 2.3
Using /dev/sdc
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) print
Model: ATA WDC WD30EZRX-00M (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdc: 3001GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: gpt
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 1049kB 3001GB 3001GB zfs
9 3001GB 3001GB 8389kB
P.S. I don't care about the data on the drives, I was just playing with different file systems. Also, this is my first time posting here, so please let me know if my posts should be formatted differently, etc.
