Is there any significant improvement in disk I/O performance ?
I know hitachi align tool ,is there any generic utility to change sector size?
Anyone has implementeded it ? Curious to know.

If an AF drive is misaligned, then its write performance will be seriously degraded. This is because each misaligned write would require a read-modify-write cycle, ie an additional rotation of the platters. However, the drive's read performance would not be affected.

That said, Seagate's drives have a feature called SmartAlign which transparently handles misalignments in the firmware.

As for a tool "to change sector size", there is no such thing. Like Hitachi, WD also has an alignment utility, but AIUI these tools work by shifting the data, sector-by-sector.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

fzabkar
Thanks for nice explanation.