Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[benali72]

Are there any benefits to rounding partition sizes?

I used GParted in Lucid 5.0.1 to set up a bunch of partitions on my disk. This tool by default checks off ROUND TO CYLINDERS, so when done I had small pieces of wasted UNALLOCATED space between partitions.

Then I used GParted under Lucid 5.2.8. It had options to round to CYL, MB, or NONE. I picked NONE and got rid of all the tiny honeycombed wasted areas between paritions.

As far as I can tell, all utilities (copy, backup, etc) work regardless of whether partitions are rounded off or not.

So is there any benefit to rounding partition sizes of which I am unaware?

Thank you.

[Flash]

Maybe there used to be, but not any more. That's my WAG.

[Burn_IT]

Not nowadays except for the wasted space.

As I've just discovered to my cost, again (it used to be a pain, but I hadn't seen it for years), different BIOS use different CHS values when translating LBAs. This can be an issue if you use one machine to prepare a disk for a different machine. I keep all my disk back-ups on one machine that has removable drive bays. I recently needed to restore one and found that the partitions no longer sat on cylinder boundaries and I though the restore had failed. Common figures are 240 and 255 for the heads.


There is a very, very good reason to make most NEW high capacity drives, and that includes high density small drives, start on a 4k boundary and that is because modern drives use 4k clusters rather than 512byte ones and not having physical and logical clusters aligned is VERY bad news for performance (and life of SSDs)

[Bruce B]

[Burn_IT]

I doesn't just make it perform worse it mean that the drive has to read and write TWO physical sectors for each logical one, and at best that immediately halves the effective size of the cache and probably halves the read/write speed and doubles the amount of work the disk has to do.
Of course it will get hotter and make more noise.

[Bruce B]

Burn_IT

I've read on various occasions about drive read and write being at unwanted angles to the sectors. But I've had no personal experience with it.

Now, a person has a problem with noisy drives. It seems to occur on all his drives with regularity.

Why him and not me?

I think maybe temperature has to do with it.

My computers generally run 24/7 in moderate temperatures, indoors Southern California.

The computers which seem to develop noisy drives are in the basement of a cold weather state. And the computers are off most of the time.

Here's my theory. Our hard drives are made of various materials. Each material expands and contracts differently. After a while, these expand and contract cycles actually make the drive different than when it was new. (this is only my theory)

Here's my guess. If after the drive has become noisy and performs worse than when new, we should write zeros to it, partition it and reformat it. This would (I think) put the heads directly above the sectors again and freshien up the drive.

? ? ?

Bruce

~

[Burn_IT]

No way that just writing zeros to it will help unless you used the opportunity to re-align the partitions, which on an old drive will make no difference as it will be 512 byte sectors anyway.
Noise can only come from 2 places (well three if you count fans)

1) is the clicking of the head movement

2) is the bearings which dry out with age and are often noisy when (and if) they start up, but get quieter when they warm up. You could try a drop of light sewing machine oil on the outside of the bearing and hope it soaks in.

If you look at the manufacturer's tools for the likes of Deskstars and Travelstars and possible others, there are setting/parameters that you can use that says to run in quiet mode, but all that does is slow the disk down and WILL affect performance.

I have a couple of 20 year old disks that make a hell of a row when cold. It sounds as though they are tearing themselves apart and is quite alarming. Given 15 minutes of running they quieten down to be almost silent.