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 PowerEdge FX2s CTO Blade 4 Slot 2U Chassis 2x 2000W
$399.00
Sun Microsystems Blade 100 Workstation UltraSPARC-IIe 500MHz 256MB Server No HDD
$95.00
DELL PowerEdge M630 Blade 2x E5-2680v4 2.4GHz =28 Cores 128GB H330 2x10Gb X520
$275.00
HP ProLiant BL460c Gen9 Blade 2x E5-2699v3 2.3GHz =36 Cores 128GB P246 650FLB
$321.00
Cisco UCSB-B200-M4 Blade Server 2 x E5-2690 V4 3 256GB (8 X 32GB) RAM NO HDD
$374.99
Dell PowerEdge M620 Blade Server 2x 10C E5-2690v2 64GB Ram 2x 600GB 10k HDD
$125.00
Google Search Appliance - Dell PowerEdge R710 x2 Xeon X5690 192GB Memory 6TB HDD
$529.99
DELL POWEREDGE FC640 Blade Server FX2 CTO Barebones iDrac Enterprise Warranty
$199.00
HP ProLiant BL460c Gen9 Blade 2x E5-2690v3 2.6GHz =24 Cores 64GB P246 650FLB
$193.00
HP ProLiant BL460c Gen9 Blade 2x E5-2680v3 2.5GHz =24 Cores 256GB P246 650FLB
$395.00