hi,

aligning partitions to start at real physical sector of ssds / stripped raids / 4kB drives is a 'good thing to do'. but i've run into a problems when trying to do it for a truecrypt partition that will contain ext3 on it. or so it seems.

when drive is question is partitioned properly and formatted with ext3 i get very reasonable write speeds around 70-80MB/s, but when i put truecrypt and ext3 on the top of it write performance becomes very unstable and goes between 1-25MB/s with very high io-wait. on the same server i dont have any performance issues with ext3 on the top of truecrypt on regular 512B-sector 500GB sata disks. so my best guess is that iowaits are caused by misalignment but i cannot really find reliable information on how to calculate optimal partition beginning. i've tried to start it at 128 logical sector, i've also tried 8132 sector as suggested here but both gave me very bad and unstable performance.

do you have any experience with similar setup? thanks!