RAID 5 Online Capacity Expansion sector size changed

Solution 1:

You will lose a bit of diskspace efficiency in this situation.

Consider the following scenario. You have a .txt file saved to the drive. It parks in a 512Byte block size and is only 200Byts. It takes up the entire spot. Smaller block sized lend to more efficient use of space and larger block sizes tend to have a higher level of performance. You can format a VMFS VMware volume with 4Mb bock sizes and the performance is excellent but, quite a bit of space is wasted.

In terms of space efficiency, smaller allocation unit sizes perform better. The average space wasted per file will be half the chosen AUS (allocation unit size). So 4K wastes 2K per file and 64K wastes 32K. If you have lots of small files, then it’s a good idea to keep the allocation size small so your harddrive space won’t be wasted. If you have lots of large files, keeping it higher will increase the system performance by having less blocks to seek.