Jun 12

Warning: The resulting partition is not properly aligned for best performance.

GNU\Linux, Sysadmin Tips Add comments

I’m adding a disk to an ubuntu machine and creating a new partition which uses the whole disk.

GNU Parted 2.2
Using /dev/sdb
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) print
Error: /dev/sdb: unrecognised disk label

So I make a new dos partition

(parted) mklabel
New disk label type? msdos
(parted) print
Model: - (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 53.7GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
 
Number  Start  End  Size  Type  File system  Flags
 
(parted) mkpart primary ext4 0 -1
Warning: The resulting partition is not properly aligned for best performance.
Ignore/Cancel?

You should align the first partition at block 64
(parted) mkpart primary ext4 64 -1
mkpart syntax is: mkpartfs part-type fs-type start-mb end-mb
so this just wastes the first 64 MB of space on the disk. Setting the start at 1 avoids the error message as well.

mkpart primary ext4 1 -1
(parted)

And your error free. Go forth and partition.
Thanks to Stefan.
This is why I put stuff on the internet.

9 Responses to “Warning: The resulting partition is not properly aligned for best performance.”

  1. NoOneElse says:
    June 20, 2010 at 9:26 am

    Hm, that just wastes the first 64MB of your device. Though not optimal either, a

    (parted) mkpart primary ext4 1 -1

    at least only wastes 1MB.

    Reply
  2. jaes says:
    September 8, 2010 at 9:35 am

    Just a post to say thanks cause this post got me out of serious chronic headaches :)

    Reply
  3. z says:
    October 10, 2010 at 2:44 pm

    Thanks for the info on how you guys used Parted. There is lacking documentation on how to properly format these Advance Format drives that lie to the OS.

    parted -a optimal /dev/sdb

    (parted) u s

    (parted) mkpart primary linux-swap 1 1G

    (parted) mkpart primart ext4 1953792s -1

    (parted) p
    Model: ATA WDC WD10EARS-00Y (scsi)
    Disk /dev/sdb: 1953525168s
    Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
    Partition Table: msdos

    Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
    1 2048s 1953791s 1951744s primary linux-swap(v1)
    2 1953792s 1953525167s 1951571376s primary ext4

    This seemed to solve all of my performance problems.

    Reply
  4. >Ubuntu File Server Part 7: Drive Formatting | dancingborg says:
    March 25, 2011 at 2:51 am

    [...] this excellent post on how to format a drive larger than 2TB. Supporting information was taken from this blog post with regard to how the drive alignment works. Finally this article from IBM was a good read on [...]

    Reply
  5. Dmitry Sherman says:
    July 1, 2011 at 5:23 am

    thanks that helped me partition my 2TB hard drive.
    for some reason the debian squeeze’s fdisk does support GPT partitions but after creation i didnt see it in /dev/sdb1. only saw /dev/sdb

    after using parted the problem solved.
    thanks!

    Reply
  6. Loren Copeland says:
    August 31, 2011 at 10:16 pm

    You can change the units to sectors by typing “unit s” while in parted.

    Reply
  7. Beerman says:
    September 2, 2011 at 6:19 pm

    Thanks, man. I hate when I´m confronted with warnings, and your tip helped me solve it with no problems.

    Reply

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