I got a new external crucial X8 usb 3.0 ssd and it reports a very large blocksize.
Unfortunately, it seems to make playing videos over the network with samba have problems. It may also be suboptimal using it on a usb 2.0 port.
blockdev --report
shows most drives have 256 sector readahead
RO RA SSZ BSZ StartSec Size Device
ro 256 512 1024 0 205111296 /dev/loop0
ro 256 512 1024 0 204873728 /dev/loop1
ro 256 512 1024 0 4096 /dev/loop2
ro 256 512 1024 0 157855744 /dev/loop3
however, my crucial ssd gets a giant 131072 readahead value. I believe this is what's causing the problems with the network drive sharing.
sudo blockdev --setra 16384 /dev/sdb
sets it to a much better value and I don't see the audio dropouts.
You can also check the value by getting the readahead for a specific drive.
blockdev --getra /dev/sdb
DELL M630 BLADE SERVER x2 XEON E5-2660V3 @ 2.6GH H730 PERC HDD CADDIES 16GB FC
$50.00
Dell PowerEdge M640 Dual Bay 2.5" SFF Blade Server Barebone No Processors No RAM
$250.00
Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis Enclosure 8x B200 M4 16x E5-2640v3 128gb
$599.99
Dell PowerEdge M620 Blade Server
$39.99
2 x HP ProLiant BL460c (447707-B21) Blade Servers No RAM No HDD
$30.00
Dell PowerEdge M620 0F9HJC Blade Server 2*E5-2670 2.60GHz 192GB RAM 2*300GB SAS
$103.99
HP Proliant BL460c G10 Gen10 Blade Server No CPU/No Mem/No Drives/P204i-B
$329.99
HP BL460c 2SFF GEN9 Blade Server 2x 12 Core Xeon E5-2670 v3 256GB RAM 600GB HDD
$199.99
Dell Poweredge M630 Blade Server 2x E5-2680 v3 2.5ghz 24-Cores / 256gb / H730
$399.99
UCSB-B200-M4 UCS Blade Server, 2x E5-2667 V3, 256GB RAM DDR4, 2x 300GB Drives
$299.99