I came across a link to Dave Lutz’s Partition Alignment Guidelines for Unified Storage blog post while catching up on zfs-discuss today. Aligning partitions correctly can make a HUGE performance difference, and it’s amazing how many people are unaware of the consequences of not laying out their partitions to align with the storage they are using (this includes segment size and partition alignment). If you are new to this topic, you should definitely read through Dave’s post!