Also worthy of note, to date there is no way to modify the block size. It's hardcoded in wafl.

~JK

"Strange, Steve" wrote:

...

Or is this all wrong, and the access doesn't occur in blocks?

It does occur in blocks, and the WAFL block size is 4K bytes.

    Steve

...

-----Original Message----- From: Edward Hibbert [mailto:EH@dataconnection.com] Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2002 5:27 PM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Block sizes

A question about block sizes on NetApp disks.

My impression is that disk access occurs in blocks. So if I write 1 byte to a disk, at some level the OS has a block in cache, updates the block, then writes that block out to disk. If I write 20K, then it probably affects multiple blocks.

If this is true, then it might be useful to know the underlying block size - because if I could ensure that my application wasn't spanning multiple blocks when I didn't need to be, I could give the physical disks a bit less of a hard time.

Does anyone know how to find this out? Or is this all wrong, and the access doesn't occur in blocks?

Thanks,

Edward.