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Byte-aligning Linux partitions on modern disks

Linux uses 512-byte sectors. Hard disks used to too. The emergence of huge TB-sized disks has caused manufacturers to changed to 4096-byte sectors. This change can cause performance degradation on Linux as it's partitions may not be aligned with these bigger sectors. The additional overhead for the disk causes a performance drop.

This raises the need for aligning your Linux partitions to the new sector size. However, many tools such as fdisk and parted are not yet doing this for you easily. IBM DevWorks has a great in-depth article on the topic: Linux on 4KB-sector disks: Practical advice
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