Solved What would happen if I used the bigger ashift?

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My SSD sector size is 512 bytes but I forgot to switch off force 4K sector size when I install FreeBSD. On the installed system, I checked with zdb -C | grep ashift and I saw it's 12. I have installed many software and don't want to reinstall again. What would happen if I used this bigger ashift? Will my drive performance decrease? Or my data will be corrupted?

Please let me know. Thanks.
 
Your data will not be corrupted.

Performance is an interesting question. I'm going to be that you won't notice the difference. And if you wanted to measure the difference, it would be quite difficult; you'd have to reinstall, set up a reproducible benchmark and an accurate measurement system, and I bet ultimately for a normal desktop or small server system (with a mixed and light workload), the differences in latencies would be so small (single-digit percent) that they'd be hard to measure.

You say your sector size is 512. It's quite possible that the SSD advertises that. However, the real internal (physical) block size of the SSD is probably much larger; on a modern one, I would guess 16 or 64K, or even larger. Internally, the SSD takes the small writes, aggregates them into blocks, and streams them out to flash chips, with read / append / erase cycles. From the viewpoint of the physical block size, the difference between 512 and 4K is minor, unless you have very intense workloads with lots of small (non-streaming random) writes.
 
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