Don’t buy the lame ass ‘green drive’. Problem solved. :)
Thanks for the heads up. This is an interesting problem, and one that is good to be aware of.
I’ve seen the same problems with Virtual Machines (VMWare) and and some storage arrays and filers like NetApp. Most linux systems (and Windows 2000/2003) start the primary partition at at sector (logical block) 63. The reason for this is tied to historical disk geometry and results in the controller performing additional work. Windows Server 2008 and Vista default at 1,048,576 which i think would alleviate a great deal of the problem.
As you say, not a major problem for most people, but something the Linux community needs to address. LinuxCon is being held in Boston this year. You should send them a note.
This sounds like an old trick for optimizing databases. Often in databases it’s best to use 64KB clusters, but if you do that you have to make sure to align your partition on a 64KB boundary, and RAID stripes on a 64KB boundary, or performance will suffer for exactly the same reason as here.
Finally, an enterprise headache hits the home user. :)