How to format a disk such that it's System is HPFS/NTFS/exFAT rather than GPT
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How to format a disk such that it's System is HPFS/NTFS/exFAT rather than GPT
Platform: A product that runs Ubuntu and streams to/from external drives.
When an external drive is connected, it's mounted and tested for throughput. A benchmark value is listed for each drive. Both ext4 and NTFS formats are supported. The GUI provides the option to format either ext4 or NTFS (so I don't know how it's done). Drives formatted NTFS on the system have very low benchmark (400 kB/s).
Issue: I have an NTFS drive that gets a benchmark of 1600 MB/s but I don't know how it was formatted. I'm looking for differences.
fdisk -l lists the drive's "System" as GPT on slow drives and as HPFS/NTFS/exFAT on the "good" drive.
Q1: Is System type the performance issue?
Q2: If yes, how do I format a drive with the right System?
If not, what else might be the problem?
Oops. That should be 160 MB/s. (Shouldn't have used a slide rule to calculate it ;-)
The benchmark tool is internal to the system; I don't know what it is or (much about) how it works.
I just know the it rates this "golden" drive much higher than identical drives (SSDs) that were formatted by the system.
Is this benchmark doing write or read tests? SSD drives may need "trimmed" to restore the write speed, also if the drive is partitioned it is possible the partition is misaligned. Won't happen with Ext4 if you do not partition the drive.
The benchmark does both read and write tests (and bypasses the cache, I'm told). There is only one partition on the drives.
The question remains, why is the benchmark rating so different on two identical SSDs formatted NTFS?
It seems to me there is some kind of mis-identification going on. Linux operating systems' access to NTFS is always inferior to native filesystems, and compared to Windows access to NTFS, and by multiple orders of magnitude. IOW, Linux access to NTFS is downright slow regardless of bus type. There's simply less difference to notice on slower buses because the bus is the ultimate bottleneck rather than the media. Is that faster "NTFS" SDD really NTFS?
So what is the make and model number of these drives?
ee GPT is the boot partition and as suggested we need to see the output of the
gdisk -l /dev/sdc
or
parted /dev/sdc print
The first drive is a legacy MBR formatted drive and the second is a GPT. In a nutshell GPT allows bootable drives larger then 2TB and almost an unlimited number of primary partitions.
What version of Ubuntu are you running? Does it support GPT? Now that was a stupid question...
Data that might explain the difference is missing for the "bad" ee GPT device because you didn't show us gdisk -l. The "bad" might actually be using a less efficient (smaller than 4k) I/O blocksize, while the "good" has clearly been partitioned in alignment with its 4k physical sectors.
This 512 sector size is certainly bogus, the real sector size is 4096. Thus, the partition is misaligned.
While misalignment is a probable explanation for poor reported performance, I cannot believe fdisk output is reliable when an unknown version of it reports both ee as only partition and 512 physical block size on a 1T device. We need to know parted and/or gdisk output to be sure what the reality is.
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