[ Thanks to linuxconfig for this link.
]
“Nowadays hard drive manufactures are switching to a
new hard drive technology which uses 4KB sectors size instead of
conventional 512B. This new technology requires little tweaks to
get a better performance in comparison to out-of-the-box settings.
This article will describe some simple to follow instructions on
how to partition the WD EARS hard-drive to get better overall
performance. Getting the partitioning part done by aligning each
partition can rapidly increase a hard drive’s performance.“512B sector size standard is here for over 30 years and
therefore lots of the code written for a Linux OS has 512 number
hard coded in its source. The main idea in regards to the 4 096 B
size sectors is to increase the bit density on each track by
reducing the number of gaps which hold Sync/DAM and ECC ( Error
Correction Code ) information between each data sectors. Therefore,
for 8 x 512 B sectors the track also holds 8 sector gaps.“By having one single sector of size 4 096 B ( 8 x 512 B ) the
track holds only 1 sector gap for each data sector thus reducing an
overhead for a need to support multiple Sync/DAM and ECC blocks and
at the same time increasing bit density.”