WD Advanced Format: do I need to do something special?

[Ivan Voras]

On 18/08/2011 11:55, Yuri wrote:
> On 08/18/2011 02:17, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
>> The below advice still applies. Do not skim the page, read it.
>>
>> http://ivoras.net/blog/tree/2011-01-01.freebsd-on-4k-sector-drives.html
>>
>> You will therefore have to go through some manual rigmarole (preferably
>> with gpart(8)) to ensure performance. If you plan on using the disks in
>> ZFS, you get to go through some extra rigmarole.
>
> I didn't know about such extra actions that are required and just
> created ZFS pool.
> zdb -C <mypool> shows ashift as 9. I read it as meaning that sector size
> if 512bytes (wrong!).
>
> But I tested the 25GB file writing/reading speed on the middle tracks
> and it seems reasonable:
> WR 55MB/s
> RD 107MB/s
>
> So can I get even better speeds if it was aware of 4k sector?

Yes, read and write speeds on modern drives should be almost equal.