On Sun, Jul 09, 2023 at 08:54:56PM +0100, David Brownlee wrote: > In practice I think it would be better not to penalise current use of > "small" (120GB SSD or 64GB or or CF/USB devices) for an edge case of > older hardware
I am not sure what you see as penalty here. I think two factors made the original size decisions sensible back then: - for large disks the space lost to alignment does not matter - native block sizes > 512 byte only happened for larger disks initially Overall it would be better to enforce alignment as least as large as the native block size on *any* disk - but IIRC it is quite hard to find that value in all cases. Martin