HDD partitioning in Linux for ext4 fs - tips needed (NOOB here)

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1

I have an Exos X18 18TB 512e/4Kn drive installed in an Ubuntu PC. I want to use ext4 fs for storagenode.
I updated the firmware to SN06 with hdparm (I didn’t manage to make SeaChest Utilities to work). Then I tried to change the sector size to 4Kn with hdparm, but even though it said “success”, it showed 512 logical sector size.
Rebooted and tried again with SeaChest lite. Success, it changed it to 4Kn. I left it alone for 3 days, just because it said that some background processes take some times after that.
After 3 days I rebooted and continued with the installation process, partitionining, mounting etc. Here are the commands I used:

sudo wipefs /dev/sdb
sudo wipefs -a -f /dev/sdb
sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdb
sudo gdisk /dev/sdb
o
n 
1      # default partition number
256    # default first sector
****   # default last sector
8300   # GUID
w

...

My question is why the sugested first sector is 256?
All other drives I partitioned with gdisk smaller or larger than 18TB sugested 2048. Is there a problem with using 256 as first sector? Should I repartition it with 2048 as first sector?
All that I did differently from other times is using hdparm to try to change sector size. Maybe it changed some sectors there, I don’t know…
What do you recommend?
I’m just on pause now and I don’t want to start putting data on the drive, just to realise later that something is wrong.
Thanks!

2

all that work may be unnecessary.

I’ve never seen an effective difference between having a spinning hard drive working 4k native or 512e.

3

Well 512 * 2048 == 1M == 4096 * 256
So it reserves the same amount of space.
So I suppose everything will be fine.
But I’m noob either, so get my answer just as an equation.
Just curious why noob is changing sector size…

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4

This makes sense. Thanks for explanation!
Why changing to native size? Well… in every discussion about sector size, everyone recommended to use the native size, guides, forums, wikipedia say the same, and the explanations make sense. So why not?
We need every bit of performance we can obtain to win races.

5

Alignment to 1 MB is useful exactly to not worry about specific storage’s block size and works well with both simple HDDs, SSD erase blocks, and more complex RAID schemes. Don’t worry about it, this thing is exactly designed so that less experienced users don’t have to worry about potential performance problems.

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