What are the correct mkfs.xfs parameters for a lying WD-EARS HDD?

[Eric Sandeen]

Matthias Schniedermeyer wrote:
> Hi
> 
> 
> More than a month ago i bought 4 Western Digital WD15EARS (1.5 TB) which 
> are (AFAIK) the first general/commercial available 4k sector SATA-HDDs.
> 
> Unfortunatly the HDDs lie about the 4k physical sector size and the most 
> prominent drawback is a worse than abysmal delete performance.
> ("Normal" Read & Write-performance is OK)
> 
> So if i wanted to (re-)mkfs the filesystems what would the correct 
> parameters be?
> 
> Kernel/Userspace is pretty recent (Debian-SID):
> mkfs.xfs version 3.1.1, kernel v2.6.33, util-linux 2.16.0
> Not that that should matter when the HDDs lies.

Recent kernel+util-linux-ng++fdisk+parted+xfsprogs -should- do the right thing for you....
Oh, but this was maybe the drive that didn't output the right stuff when queried.

Make sure your partitions, if any, are on 4k boundaries.(*)  older fdisk at least
won't do this by default, not sure about parted.

once that is done, tell mkfs.xfs "-s size=4096" to set the 4k sector size
(again, all-upstream should do this magically for sane drives)

-Eric

(*)unless the drive has an offset to make 512-sector 63 line up on a nice
boundary... in which case I guess you could experiment with perf both
ways to be sure...

> 
> Bis denn
>