alignment for flash drives

[CU]

If I am going to create a partition and format a usb flash drive with ext4 do I need to worry about alignment like you do with SSD's? If so how do I align it linux?

 

[Nothinman]

The alignment issues for SSDs only matter for performance reason and chances are your USB stick isn't fast enough for it to make a difference.

 

[CU]

I know it is for performance reasons. I was just looking at it as USB flash drives can use all the help they can get for writes.

 

[Cerb]

What you really want, then, is a fast thumb drive. I'm sure Exdeath has passionate opinions on what ones are best. Typical thumb drives are still <10MB/s peak write, and between USB 2, the controllers, and low bandwidth only one or two slow flash chips, there's not much you can do. Any improvements from aligning, assuming that would do anything at all, would have an impact orders of magnitude less than USB 2 (slow for small reads and writes) and the flash controller (slow for everything).

P.S. http://www.storagereview.com/corsair_force_f120_ssd_review
There's no good reason not to align a fast SSD, but if you are using USB 1/2, USB is going to kill seek times and both read and write speeds to such a degree as to make it worthless, even assuming there would be a measurable improvement.

Now, if you're using a USB 3 thumb drive that can write at 30+MB/s, in a USB 3 port, then we may be working on incorrect assumptions.

 

[CU]

Thanks I already have a fast drive, so I will just partition and format it without doing anything special to it.

 

[exdeath]

My favorite USB thumb drives are the Patriot SuperSonic and Mushkin Ventura Pro in the 64 GB models, but more because they are the fastest that are still in the traditional small form factor that really classifies these as TRUE "thumb" drives. They are very slim with a cross section not much bigger than the USB connector itself, don't block other ports, fit in your back pocket without budging or stabbing, etc. These are 120 MB/s read / 80 MB/s write class devices.

There are a handful of much faster "thumb" drives that go to 200 MB/sec (Patriot Supersonic Magnums, Kingston HyperX MAX, etc) but these are rather large and bulky compared to the two I mentioned, not to mention astronomical price premiums. When you start getting into "thumb" drives like the HyperX and Magnums you don't really have a "thumb" drive form factor any more anyway, and you are better off with higher performance and cheaper price just getting a 60-128 GB SSD and a USB 3.0/SATA adapter. A 64 or 120 GB SSD would be less than $100 (instead of $200-300 for the "thumb drives") and DESTROY the thumb drives in small random transfers having a true SSD controller instead of cute "thumb drive controller".

I'd go for the largest capacity you can afford (64 GB hopefully) as speed comes from parallel NAND channels, and parallel NAND channels comes from more physical chips, ergo higher capacity = better in more ways than one.

 

[exdeath]

Oh the alignment, lol.

Just diskpart it in Win 7 and make sure it's 1024KB. 1024KB covers every conceivable NAND page and block size out there right now. 2048KB alignment might be around the corner soon with .22nm NAND as the block size increases from 1 MB to 2 MB.

 

[Soulkeeper]

When I first setup my M4 SSD I didn't align it

ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
181 Non4k_Aligned_Access    0x0022   100   100   001    Old_age   Always       -       405 130 275

that smart value just grew crazily
I now have my partitions aligned to 1MiB
To be honest performance is about the same, but atleast the smart value isn't going crazy
I'll admit I didn't do extensive benchmarking prior to aligning however.

 

[China_E_Insider]

If you can run a low level format and play with the ECC settings of the flash memory, you should be able to increase the performance. But as with anything there may be trade-offs such as shortened lifespan and lower capacity.