Re: NetBSD and 4k sectors

[Dan LaBell <dan4l-nospam%verizon.net@localhost>]

On Mar 26, 2015, at 5:34 PM, Helge Muehlmeier wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Hi,
>
> can NetBSD handle hdd's with 4k sectors?
>
> There is a 1TB harddisk I'm looking for but can I use such disk with
> NetBSD?

If I assume you mean 'handle properly', then currently the situation is
the installer doesn't help you much to avoid possibly pathological
(performance-wise) situations, so you need to fore-armed with a lot  
of info,
and perhaps make some pencil and paper calculations.

Adding a 4k native sector disk, to an existing installation (or system)
is easier.  Basically, for ffs, 4k should be your fragment size, but the
if the filesystem isn't aligned, because the slice isn't aligned  
then....
Once everything is right, then everything is good, but nothing  
prohibits.

A thread, maybe a month or two ago, covered this, I believe the answer
was to start 1 MiB in or 1 MiB in (OR 1024 kb , so sector 2048 (std  
secs)
or I guess sector 256 with 4k sectors.. but don't quote me..
I remember thinking,if apple's pdisk might be a simpler
approach, and also if a script that converted disklabel's comments
from something like:
  # (Cyl.  49884*-  49987*)
where the * is meant to be something you should avoid, (archaic imo)
to something, that would *star* slices that aren't aligned to 4k or a  
MiB,
would be useful.