Advanced Format Drive ?

[Robert Bonomi]

> From: "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg at tristatelogic.com>
> Subject: Re: Advanced Format Drive ?
> Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2012 14:07:50 -0800
>
>
> And while we are on the subject... Has anybody ever down any analysis
> (i.e. benchmarking) to find out if -f 4096 is even the best number for
> a modern high(er) capacity drive?  I'm just sort-of wondering if 8192
> or 16384 might be better.

As long as the fragment size is a power-of-two multiple of the media sector
size, there is no significant performance difference.  The only case where
a larger fragment size makes any difference is heavy random i/o on files
where the larger fragment size translates to one less level of indirect
block in the meta-data.

Larger fragment sizes also make for more 'waste' space in the 'used'
part of the disk, assuming random file sizes.

And reduce the space savings gained by _not_ writing 'holes' to disk.

For these reasons, in general, small is better.

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