Align USB flash drives to 4096 bytes as well such as SSDs? Check in Linux?

permissive · 08-20-2013, 05:57 AM

@rknichols

Thank you for refreshing my knowledge on SSDs. I read about these some time ago but of course I forgot.

Quote:

Originally Posted by rknichols

In fact, enabling automatic TRIM can seriously hurt performance. Prior to SATA 3.1, TRIM was defined as a non-queueable command, so using the "discard" (automatic TRIM) option can cause slow write performance. Scheduling a once-a-day fstrim operation a a cron job might be preferable.

I have a SATA 1.0 motherboard with a SATA 3.0 SSD. The default in Windows 7 is TRIM enabled (the last time I checked). I don't know what thta means, compared to your linked post to Patrick Nagel's specific case. Maybe more information besides that particular case in that blog post?

permissive · 08-20-2013, 05:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rknichols

For SSDs, you want to avoid layouts that would have an erase block, which might be 256KB, that spans more than one filesystem. It's not for performance reasons, but for data integrity. You want to avoid operations in one filesystem causing part of another filesystem to be copied and reallocated. That's why modern partitioning tools default to 1-Megabyte alignment for partitions.

So the bottom line is you not only suggest to align for 4096 bytes in partitions (for SSDs) but for whole megabytes as well? Where can I read about this issue more? Many thanks.

permissive · 08-20-2013, 07:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jefro

I doubt you'd find much improvement. USB flash drives tend to be a collection of weird stuff going on inside. Not sure I'd ever attempt to fool with them. They may mount like a scsi but aren't internally a true drive. Maybe CF or SD flash may be more ISO like.

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/displ...me=help-manual

Use MiB alignment for modern operating systems. This setting aligns partitions to start and end on precise mebibyte (1,048,576 byte) boundaries. MiB alignment provides enhanced performance when used with RAID systems and with Solid State Drives, such as USB flash drives.

jefro · 08-20-2013, 03:06 PM

If you want, do as I suggested. Prove to us there is some benefit to this task. Prove that you can really align any and all usb flash drives. Prove to me that I am wrong about how usb flash drives are produced.

permissive · 08-23-2013, 04:37 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jefro

If you want, do as I suggested. Prove to us there is some benefit to this task.

Quote:

Originally Posted by jefro

There is a hardware issue with usb flash drives. They are not all the same. They were never intended to replicate a hard drive.

Quote:

Originally Posted by permissive

About USB sticks were never intended to replace HDDs? They have come a long time, definitely. Think about USB3 sticks, certified to run Windows 8 from it.

Link - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windo...ndowstogo.aspx
Go to the section Windows To Go Certified Drives

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Anyways, what is the default way you should format a USB stick? Windows? Linux? Special application?

With this recommendation - http://www.pendrivelinux.com/restori...key-partition/ - I formatted a stick using the SD Card association tool - it got totally weird results: instead of 4k, it got 32k sectors, instead of 1 MiB free space at start, it got 4 MiB space. Maybe it was bad advice from pendrivelinux.com?

permissive · 08-23-2013, 04:42 AM

Maybe some additional info for this topic as well: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...6/#post5014360

cascade9 · 08-23-2013, 06:24 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by permissive

Link - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windo...ndowstogo.aspx
Go to the section Windows To Go Certified Drives

Jefro is pretty much right, USB flash drives werent made to replace HDDs.

You might find reading this page helpful-

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/How_to_Dam...Storage_Device