[mdlug] Linux VMs - virtual disk best practices

[Aaron Kulkis]

Drew wrote:
> What about aligning partitions on cylinder boumdaries?

Doesn't really matter EXCEPT for striping (RAID 1).
Your disk drive reports having FAR more read/write heads
(typically 63 ~ 255) when the actual number is usually
on the order of 6 or fewer.  Therefore, the reported
cylinder boundaries oftentimes aren't.

The idea is that we want a 4 kib read to only generate ONE
read-sector of activity, if possible, not 3 sectors, with
8kb of data sorted through and tossed