Seagate X8 Accelerator Seagate X8 Accelerator User Guide for Windows - Page 34

10.0 APPLICATION NOTES 10.1 DATA BLOCK SIZES AND ALIGNMENTS The Seagate X8 Accelerator drive exposes 512 byte sectors, but is internally organized in 4K byte sectors (similar to the new Advanced Format hard drives). This means data writes of blocks smaller than 4096 will involve read-modify-write cycles on the flash and be correspondingly slower than access of native-block size and above. Reads will be impacted, but at a much smaller performance penalty. In addition to using data sizes of 4K bytes or larger, the data blocks themselves should be aligned at 4K boundaries for best performance. NOTE For most applications which use the NTFS file system, both of these prior constraints are automatically met by the file system itself. By default Windows 2008 R2 generates partitions which are properly aligned i.e. on 4KB boundaries, and NTFS uses 4K allocation units. 10.2 IOMETER Seagate recommends using the 2010 version of IOMeter. It is available from the standard IOMeter repository at Sourceforge.net: http://sourceforge.net/projects/iometer/files/iometer-devel/1.1.0-rc1/ Other versions of Iometer have limitations which don't affect hard drive testing but do have a negative impact on the much higher performing Seagate X8 Accelerator Drive. SEAGATE X8 ACCELERATOR FOR WINDOWS USER GUIDE, REV. A 30