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The Graveyard - Products No Longer Supported => D-Link Storage => DNS-321 => Topic started by: amcallis on January 29, 2012, 12:16:43 PM

Title: Need to align drive with 512 Byte sectors?
Post by: amcallis on January 29, 2012, 12:16:43 PM

My DNS-321 NAS (firmware 1.03) has one Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200 P/N 9SL154-336, which I'm 99% sure uses 512 Byte sectors.  When I write a 300 MB file to the drive over wired GBit ethernet through a GBit router, I get ~7 MB/sec speed (as reported by Win7 file transfer info).  Copying the other direction is ~8 MB/sec.  Router status lights indicate both my PC and the NAS are connected at GBit speed.

I've been reading about aligning partitions, but unsure if that's only applicable to drives with 4k sectors...

Question is: Will I get a performance boost by aligning the start of the partitions to be an integer multiple of 8?  Or is there some other way to get faster speed out of this hardware?

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root@storage:/mnt/HD_a2/ffp/home/root# fdisk -lu

Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks  Id System
/dev/sda1              63     1060289      530113+ 82 Linux swap
/dev/sda2         2088450  1953520064   975715807+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda4         1060290     2088449      514080  83 Linux

Title: Re: Need to align drive with 512 Byte sectors?
Post by: amcallis on January 29, 2012, 01:48:22 PM

The above is with NAS Jumbo frames enabled at 9000, and PC jumbo frames disabled (set at 1514 byes).

Disabling jumbo frames on the NAS & PC gives me ~9 MB/sec writing to it, and ~10 MB/sec reading from it.  An improvement, but not a whole lot.

When I tried changing my PC's network adaptor jumbo packet settings above 1514 bytes, I couldn't connect to the drive unless NAS Jumbo Packet (MTU) was disabled.  And with NAS MTU disabled, and PC jumbo packets set above 1514 bytes, I had weird behavior like files not actually getting deleted when I tried deleting them.

Router is a Trendnet TEW-639GR - I found no info if it supports jumbo packets, but I can still browse the web with PC jumbo packets >1514 bytes without issue.