While the world+dog is getting all excited about the move from 512-byte to 4096-byte sector hard drives, Linux is clearly unready for it. Timothy Miller, the founder of the Open Graphics Project said that on paper Linux should unaffected by some of the pitfalls of this transition, but his own experiments prove that Linux is just as vulnerable to the potential performance impact as Windows XP.

Despite this issue being known about for a long time, basic Linux tools for partitioning and formatting drives have not caught up and users of the drives will suffer from a  slow write performance. He thinks it is caused by improper logical-to-physical sector alignment. “OS's like Linux use 4K blocks (or multiples of 4K) to store data, which matches well with the physical sector. However, nothing restricts you from creating a partition that starts on an odd-numbered 512-byte logical sector. This misalignment causes a performance hit since the drive has to read and rewrite the 4K sectors with whatever 512-byte slices changed,” he said.

He said that while the drives are on the market now, the Linux community have  known about this issue for a long time, and now it's here, and we haven't fully prepared. Ubuntu, uses "parted", which has a very nice "--align optimal" option that will do the right thing. But parted is incomplete, and we must rely on tools like fdisk for everything else, he said.