4k alignment

17 Thoughts on “4k alignment”

1. sergey on 11. Februar 2011 at 22:29 said:

   Please give me a final release date, your wonderful creations. At least approximately.

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   • volker on 11. Februar 2011 at 23:33 said:

     It’s released when it’s done ;-)

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2. Taylor on 11. Februar 2011 at 02:10 said:

   Off topic, but check this out!

   http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/

   Best of both worlds, the merger of OMV and FreeNAS! :D

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   • Paul on 12. Februar 2011 at 19:24 said:

     What an abortion!

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3. darkbyte on 5. Februar 2011 at 18:48 said:

   Interesting info here http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/02/20/aligning-filesystems-to-an-ssds-erase-block-size/

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4. Matt on 4. Februar 2011 at 07:48 said:

   I’ve been running a bunch of WD EARS drives and it has always been a pain. The drive doesn’t report the actual physical sector size.

   I simply use the following command in parted to manually align it: mkpart primary 64 -1

   I’m fairly certain you can also align it on mkpart primary 40 -1 (and a few others)

   You might just keep a small list of drive names that have 4k sectors and apply the right scheme. It is ugly and a hack–but it is probably less pain. Eventually the drives will stop lying to us.

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   • volker on 4. Februar 2011 at 10:33 said:

     I simply use the following command in parted to manually align it: mkpart primary 64 -1

     If you do so, what is shown if you execute ‘parted -l /dev/sdX’ ? Is the entered start point used or has it been changed by parted. If i use 2048s 100% the list command displayes me something like 17.9k for the start point of the partition. But i have to say that ‘parted /dev/sdX align-check opt 1′ tells me the partition is aligned correctly.

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5. Shr3k on 3. Februar 2011 at 14:19 said:

   I use dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd* for a ten seconds, then CTRL+C, then gdisk without problem. http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/walkthrough.html

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6. rjwaldren on 2. Februar 2011 at 22:11 said:

   I haven’t looked at it in a while… I sold off my WD EARS drives because of the hassle and don’t regret it.

   gdisk – \GPT fdisk\ per the authors site should do the right thing on 4k drives, but it’s only in sid and even the sid version is from before support was added and the debian package appears unmaintained.

   So far in my search, aside from the latest gdisk the only other tool that claims it should always do the right thing is gparted. Any other tools (parted, fdisk, etc) are vague in thier changlogs or require manual intervention. Sadly if the drives didn’t lie the tools could do the right thing without hacks.

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   • rjwaldren on 4. Februar 2011 at 00:30 said:

     I made a mistake – The version of gdisk in Sid is current, the date on the authors site is wrong. I’m assuming you want to use tools available in Squeeze though, rather than workarounds or self hosting.

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     • volker on 4. Februar 2011 at 10:29 said:

       > I’m assuming you want to use tools available in Squeeze though, rather than workarounds or self hosting.
       That’s right.

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7. btechnet on 2. Februar 2011 at 21:25 said:

   Volker take a look here:

   http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/fdisk-unable-to-create-partition-greater-2tb.html

   “if you are using Debian or Ubuntu Linux, you need to recompile the kernel. Set CONFIG_EFI_PARTITION to y to compile this feature.”

   The alternative is to use fdisk with 4k align and use ext3-4

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   • volker on 3. Februar 2011 at 00:04 said:

     Debian Squeeze already supports GPT.

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8. Kevin on 2. Februar 2011 at 09:11 said:

   Hi Volka,
   Not totally sure, but is this a result of the following bug?
   http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=304727

   Sorry if I’ve thrown you a red herring and wasted your time.

   PS Keep up the good work

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9. Simon on 2. Februar 2011 at 02:59 said:

   this might give you some insight:
   http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-4kb-sector-disks/index.html?ca=drs-#gpt_solution

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10. btechnet on 2. Februar 2011 at 00:59 said:

    Volker, there is a patch for the 4k problem with parted. Ubuntu 10.04 included the patch to fix the 4k problem. While some people still complain about it not working, it seems as it might not be a solution to the problem.

    What about using fdisk instead for 4k alignment?

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    • volker on 2. Februar 2011 at 19:21 said:

      fdisk does not support GPT.

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