As disk capacity keeps growing to 2TB per disk and beyond, the traditional sector size of 512 bytes becomes more and more inefficient. Some vendors have already introduced disks with an internal sector size of 4096 bytes, e.g. Western Digital with their WDxxEARS series.
Some operating systems (e.g. Microsoft Windows) are not able to support sector sizes of more than 512 bytes, so the disk uses 4096 bytes only internally, and behaves to the outside world like a traditional disk.
For Solaris 10 and ZFS this poses a major problem, as ZFS assumes the sector size the drive reports to it is also its physical sector size. If the drive reports a sector size of 512 bytes, it will allocate data on 512 byte sector boundaries and it will read and write data in chunks of at least 512 bytes. Of course, ZFS will also write data in much bigger chunks, but only to optimize the overall I/O pattern. As a consequence, the newer 4K-sector-disks will exhibit terrible performance problems (the disk has to carry out read-modify-write cycles).
Oracle has addressed this problem in PSARC 2008/769. This seems to be a fairly generic and flexible solution, however it will only be available in the next release of Solaris. It might be already integrated into OpenSolaris, but a migration to OpenSolaris is currently not an option for me, even though I'm only using it at home.
So, is there a solution to the problem in Solaris 10? Yes, there is.
Stay tuned.
Saturday, August 7. 2010
Solaris and the new 4K-Sector-Disks (e.g. WDxxEARS) / Part 1
Comments
Display comments as
(Linear | Threaded)
I am also having the same issue. Installgrub doesn't work correctly at all. Do you have any ideas as of yet?
#1
Graham
on
2011-05-03 20:44
The author does not allow comments to this entry
www.edugeek.net on : PingBack