Quote from thstart:
The only way to know is to try it yourself and make a lot of benchmarks. The partition alignment is a common sense when you understand how it works - it is the same with CPU memory. The other factors - it depends.
It is a part of our research for what can be achieved from available hardware to create something like a not expensive dedicated appliance for financial database.
This speed gain is valid for particular very narrowly defined circumstances. You can format and align the hard drive as described and still do not get significant speed gain.
It depends from the combination of sector size, data, database and machine configuration- they have to fit each other. ~50% gain is most common. We reached 100% for particular cases with big (GB) data.
I am getting this speed gain because this machine is used as a dedicated database server for specific kind of data (financial) and NOTHING else.
Our custom developed in house database reads and writes in chunks compatible with the sector size. We made the following tests - read/write in increasing data chunk sizes beginning with 2KB, increments of 2KB up to 10GB. We ran these tests several weeks and made a graph to find the optimal permutation for this particular machine configuration. Then tuned the database accordingly. For every machine these is a range of optimal parameters which you can get only doing a real world tests with your own data you will use actually - you cannot get this from the official specs and the official benchmarks.
