4k sector drives

[Khelben Blackstaff]

> What MAY hurt, also for large writes, are the meta-data operations while 
> writing the file. (e.g. the file-size changes, journaling ...)

> But i haven't tested that and can't say for sure how much that hurts.

It hurts a lot. On my 1TB EARS when i was benchmarking unaligned
partitions, untarring a linux kernel for example took ages. (tar output
finished quickly but then you had to wait a long time till the shell
prompt returns)

With aligned partition, performance is normal.