[Parted-maintainers] Bug#601813: Parted's problematic alignment message

[Elliott Mitchell]

found 601813 2.3-12
stop

This is still present in newer versions.  In interactive mode you get the
message:

"Warning: The resulting partition is not properly aligned for best performance.
Ignore/Cancel?"

Reading #643625, this message is given for any disk slice not aligned to
1MB.  Given the circumstances it appears in, the message is about as
useful as displaying a gigantic question mark on screen since this leaves
no clue this is based on arbitrary (though not entirely unreasonable)
built-in limit which is neither documented nor findable by looking up
information on the disk drive.

In addition to Andras Korn's suggestion of printing the "optimal" values,
I'd suggest "align", "+align" and "-align" options for the above prompt.
These would be for nearest "optimal" alignment, nearest higher "optimal"
sector, and nearest lower "optimal" sector.

I must also point out it is quite possible 1MB may not be too small to be
optimal with future storage devices.  I suspect the technology behind
Western Digital/HGST's "shingled magnetic recording" may well result in
an optimal write size distinctly larger than 1MB (and Flash could
follow).

I'm inclined to rate this as distinctly worse than wishlist given how
often people will run into this and how bad the behavior is.


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