Re: Calculating optimal disk partitions

[Chris Murphy]

On May 10, 2013, at 1:00 PM, Ulf Zibis <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Am 10.05.2013 04:52, schrieb Chris Murphy:
>> The simplest rule of thumb is to start a partition at 1MB, and specify all 
>> partition sizes in whole MB's. It solves this, and maybe also for SSDs. The 
>> open question is some SSDs have 2+MB erase block sizes and it's not clear if 
>> there's a benefit, or even a way, to partition on 2MB boundaries. Any recent 
>> partition tool starts the first partition on a 1MB boundary.
> 
> Isn't it possible to to give more choice in the dialogue?
> I also curious about the internal calculation for "what is optimal".

For HDD the only concern is for 512e drives, and it's very simple, aligning on 
8 logical sectors equates to the file system blocks aligning to physical 
sectors.

For SSD it's not so simple because manufacturer's are all doing different 
things and optimizations in firmware, but not documenting any of it. So again 
the best option is specifying the first partition start sector of 2048 (i.e. 
1MB), and from there in whole MB increments. And by MB I actually mean MiB.


Chris Murphy