I/O misalignments might occur on properly aligned LUNs

ONTAP might report I/O misalignments on properly aligned LUNs. In general, these misalignment warnings can be disregarded as long as you are confident that your LUN is properly provisioned and your partitioning table is correct.

LUNs and hard disks both provide storage as blocks. Because the block size for disks on the host is 512 bytes, LUNs present blocks of that size to the host while actually using larger, 4-KB blocks to store data. The 512-byte data block used by the host is referred to as a logical block. The 4-KB data block used by the LUN to store data is referred to as a physical block. This means that there are eight 512-byte logical blocks in each 4-KB physical block.

The host operating system can begin a read or write I/O operation at any logical block. I/O operations are only considered aligned when they begin at the first logical block in the physical block. If an I/O operation begins at a logical block that is not also the start of a physical block, the I/O is considered misaligned. ONTAP automatically detects the misalignment and reports it on the LUN. However, the presence of misaligned I/O does not necessarily mean that the LUN is also misaligned. It is possible for misaligned I/O to be reported on properly aligned LUNs.

If further investigation is required, technical support can run diagnostic commands that show detailed I/O alignment data to confirm the presence or absence of true LUN misalignment.