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With many new hard drive disks the physical sector size is 4096. Would it be possible to make the system use a logical sector size of the same size, rather than the default logical sector size of 512?

How would you configure that?

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There is a difference between block size and cluster-size but there is no such thing as logical sector size in ext4.

Probably you already have an IO block of 4096: try doing a stat .bash_logout in your home directory.

  File: ‘.bash_logout’
  Size: 220         Blocks: 8          IO Block: 4096   regular file

For more info: man mkfs.ext4

And finally: Stop worrying! ext4 uses heuristics to format your drive as efficiently as possible. ;-)

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  • @matt: don't forget to click the grey check-mark under the "0" at the left of this text, which means "yes, this answer is valid"! ;-)
    – Fabby
    Jan 15, 2015 at 9:38
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    Indeed! good to know. Yet a certain disk command line utility does use that term.
    – matanox
    Jan 15, 2015 at 9:38
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    Yes, that's because of historical reasons... try filing a bug at the FSF and they'll tell you: "Some scripts might use this "feature" and we keep it for backward compatibility"... It's outdated now, but guess what this will look like in 25 years... ;)
    – Fabby
    Jan 15, 2015 at 9:42
  • Maybe you are also expert on SSD usage and care to comment on my other question? askubuntu.com/questions/572168/…
    – matanox
    Jan 15, 2015 at 9:44
  • @Rinzwind gave you a better answer I would have given, but I download huge torrent files so I keep my /tmp on my SSD which is much larger then my RAM (only 4GB)...
    – Fabby
    Jan 15, 2015 at 9:51

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