Images partitioned right? Good USB drives? (Re: Woodhouse on flash storage)

[Sascha Silbe]

On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 02:46:17AM +0100, Martin Dengler wrote:

> Nope (SoaS) - that'll waste your partition table in favour of whatever
> I copied from my dsd-inspired "make-fake-device" partition table
> script[1].  I'd love patches.
  From that script:
> NUM_HEADS=16
> NUM_SECTORS_PER_TRACK=62

That means 16KB alignment (16*62*512/16384 = 31) which is most likely 
smaller than the erase block size on flash storage >= 1GB.


>      Do this for ext3 (omit -j for ext2):
>
>      fdisk -H 224 -S 56 /dev/sdb
That's already a bit better (128KB alignment) and more or less as good 
as you can get for ext3 (the Journal seems to be only 128KB-aligned and 
even for that you need a recent enough mke2fs).
Unfortunately there's no real way to find out the erase block size 
(other than being a really big customer and getting access to real data 
sheets), but my guess would be that 128KB might be enough for 1GB flash, 
but might not e.g. for my 16GB one. The upper limit for the latter is 
4MB (total size is an odd multiple of 4MB), so that's what I used for 
alignment of all on-disk structures (as far as possible).
By using 128 heads (-H 128) and 32 sectors/track (-S 32) you get 2MB 
alignment and can even increase it further by choosing appropriate 
cluster numbers. Watch out for the numbering: it seems to be 1-based, so 
to get 4MB alignment you need to use _odd_ cluster numbers as starting 
position. I also had the impression that fdisk uses salesman-MB, so 
better enter cylinder numbers instead (number of cylinders = 
size-in-MB/2).

>      mke2fs -j -E stripe-width=32,resize=500G /dev/sdb1
That gives you 128KB again (because block size is 4KB). I went with 
stripe-width=1024 instead to get 4MB alignment. Doesn't work for the 
Journal, of course.
Would be good to know whether ext4 does proper alignment of the journal.

CU Sascha

-- 
http://sascha.silbe.org/
http://www.infra-silbe.de/
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