On 12/19/07, Bill Davidsen [off-list ref] wrote:

As other posts have detailed, putting the partition on a 64k aligned
boundary can address the performance problems. However, a poor choice of
chunk size, cache_buffer size, or just random i/o in small sizes can eat
up a lot of the benefit.

I don't think you need to give up your partitions to get the benefit of
alignment.

How might that benefit be realized?
Assume I have 3 disks, /dev/sd{b,c,d} all partitioned identically with
4 partitions, and I want to use /dev/sd{b,c,d}3 for a new SW raid.

What sequence of steps can I take to ensure that my raid is aligned on
a 64K boundary?
What effect do the different superblock formats have, if any, in this situation?

-- 
Jon