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The 4 KiB Sector Performance Issue
If using HDDs from Western Digital (WD) with the string "EARS" in the model name, poor performance may have been encountered. Normally HDDs store data with a sector size of 512 bytes; WD's Advanced Format Technology uses 4096 byte sectors. Alignment of data on disk is essential to get the best performance. It's also only a matter of time until other vendors ship disks with non-512-bytes sectors.