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I am interested in relating the position of a file on disk and the I/O R/W performance characteristics associated with this position.

I have been able to find two benchmarks, but they are both for Windows (see images below). I would be interested in finding similar benchmarks for Linux with a view to running them on my own machines.

I would also be interested in knowing how one can find out the position of a given file (CHS - Cylinder, Head, Sector) on disk. I found this thread (and links within) interesting, but didn't tell me what I want to know.

Images from Windows benchmarks.

From here:

enter image description here

And here:

enter image description here

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    The CHS mapping are hardly true anymore, most disks have a block mapping and that's all. To find blocks you need a combination of stat (to find the inode) and then find that inode inside the groups dumped by dumpe2fs.
    – grochmal
    Jun 30, 2016 at 23:58
  • Thanks for your input. Yes, the thread to which I linked explained that CHS was no longer completely applicable. "(Cylinder/Head/Sector) was used in the past for this. CHS addresses did (originally) map to actual, physical locations on disk platters". But surely a physical location on a disk still has a meaning? OK, I'll take a look at what stat and dumpe2fs can tell me. You couldn't run the commands on one of your files and give a quick outline of what the numbers mean?
    – Vérace
    Jul 1, 2016 at 0:04
  • Just ran this: "[pol@localhost workbench]$ dumpe2fs ./mysql-workbench-community-6.3.7-1.fc23.x86_64.rpm dumpe2fs 1.42.8 (20-Jun-2013) dumpe2fs: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open ./mysql-workbench-community-6.3.7-1.fc23.x86_64.rpm Couldn't find valid filesystem superblock. [pol@localhost workbench]$ " - that looks bad. I just took the first file to hand. I seem to get this on every file.
    – Vérace
    Jul 1, 2016 at 0:06
  • heh, you run stat on a file but dumpe2fs must be run on a block device. First line in the man :)
    – grochmal
    Jul 1, 2016 at 0:13
  • Thanks again - jumped the gun a bit! That's a lot of data - is there an "Dummy's Guide"? :-)
    – Vérace
    Jul 1, 2016 at 0:19

1 Answer 1

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To find the block address of a file, it is much more convenient to use the filefrag -v command, which works with commonly-used Linux filesystems these days (ext4, XFS, Btrfs, f2fs, etc.)

$ filefrag -v /boot/initramfs-3.10.0-327.13.1.el7_lustre.x86_64
Filesystem type is: ef53
File size of /boot/initramfs-3.10.0-327.13.1.el7_lustre.x86_64 is 21375560 (20875 blocks of 1024 bytes)
 ext:     logical_offset:        physical_offset: length:   expected: flags:
   0:        0..   10239:      30721..     40960:  10240: 
   1:    10240..   16383:      43009..     49152:   6144:      40961:
   2:    16384..   20479:     198657..    202752:   4096:      49153:
   3:    20480..   20874:     196712..    197106:    395:     202753: last,eof
/boot/initramfs-3.10.0-327.13.1.el7_lustre.x86_64: 4 extents found

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