Agonizingly slow SATA HDD performance

[Doron]

On 09/13/2010 04:14 AM, Robert Nichols wrote:

>
> You almost certainly have a drive with a 4KB physical sector size, and it
> will suffer a 10-fold drop in write performance if your partitions do not
> start on logical (512-byte) sector numbers that are a multiple of 8.
> Align your partitions properly, and all is well.  More and more drives
> are coming out with that 4KB physical sector size, so you're going to have
> to bite that bullet eventually.
>

Check to see if the drive from wd has "ears" in its name. That one 
requires "Advanced Format" or alignment like Robert said.
I've heard that formatting the drive using newer tools with newer kernel 
(like Fedora13 or Ubuntu Lucid) will do that for you automatically.

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/WhitePapers/ENG/2579-771430.pdf