Solid-State Drives (SSD)

[acje99]

Thanks to all for the replies.

Yep, I used diskpart, not diskpar.

Used the system information, componets, disk method to get the alignment.  It showed:

Disk 0  Partition 0

partiton offset 32,256

So 32,256 / 4096 = 7.875.......... so looks like my drive is misaligned.

Now will have to check into exactly how to realign the drive for "best performance".

I have read that Dell does some strange things in their partitons, to make the recovery partition, and media direct stuff work.  So when I did an "as is" cloning operation, all of the weirdness was copied also.

When is the alignment set?  Is it when you format the drive?

Question?  Is it possible to align a drive first, and then clone all the stuff WITHOUT changing the alignment?

Or,  will I have to align the drive and then reinstall everything from scratch?  Not really looking forward to that option.

Going to be interesting to see what the latest firmware does when it comes out.

Thanks for all the help and suggestions.

Stephen

[targetbsp]

The drive is aligned when the partition is made but err... well... the point of post 1 of this thread is how to fix it if it's wrong so presumably you can just do that.

[DaZ]

QUOTE: When is the alignment set? Is it when you format the drive?

No alignment is done on the creation of the partition boundaries before any formatting is applied (RAW).

It's basically the physical starting position of a partition on the media in question.

QUOTE: Question? Is it possible to align a drive first, and then clone all the stuff WITHOUT changing the alignment?

I don't think so as most backup software will remove any existing partition(s) and start the restore from scratch (as such).

If you created a full backup image of already aligned SSD using the correct settings for a exact 1:1 copy you should be able to restore it back byte for byte.

But the default method used by many backup apps is not usually to create a 1:1 / byte for byte image.

[vrette]

I have a CT256M225 in a Dell Studio XPS laptop. I cloned the drive and eliminated the recovery partition, so the drive now has two partitions. The first partition is around 40MB for diagnostics. and accroding to diskpart It starts at 32256. The remainder of the drive is my C: drive, and it starts at 41125400. I have Acronix Disk Director 10, True Image 2010, and GPart at my disposal. Can someone walk me through the steps to align both partitions on the disk? Or do I really only need to worrry about the C: drive. From what I read, if I move it to 42598400, it will be correctly aligned?

Thanks

[Gavinsan]

Just been playing around wit my new 128gb SSD and to get the offset at the command prompt type "wmic partition get Name,StartingOffset".

To check format is normal NTFS 4kb at command prompt "fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo L:" where L is the drive letter. Bytes per cluster should 4096.

Also after playing around with paritions, offsets, backups etc discoverd teh following.

Acronis True Image 2010 will restore an image backup to a created raw partition that is aligned. Blanked ssd, create an aligned primary partition but not not format. Restored True image backup onto raw partition and it didn't affect offset. ie it doesnt delete it and recreate a new one. Which is very handy!

Also using Snapshot has the same result.

i did it all from a bootable Win7 install USB drive using snapshot and diskpart. Very simple!

[tree]

actually, i use easeus partition master to change th partition of my Vista, the home version is free and work flawlessly. thumb up! you guys may get it free here: http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm

[vrette]

So I finally got some time to research this and deleted the Dell diagnostics partition since I could run it from a CD if I had to, and went about aligning my hard drive. My starting offset according to diskpar is now 524288, which divided by 4096 gives me 128. So all is well except I was surprised that my primary hard drive performance rating remained the same under Vista. Now, I have no idea if the Windows Experience Index test has any credibility, but shouldn't my hard drive score gone up even just a little with proper alignment?

[HKPolice]

I did "wmic partition get Name,StartingOffset" and the SSD's partition offset is 1048576, is that normal?

Thanks

[DaZ]

Yup it's fine.

That's a 1024Kb offset which is the Vista SP2 / Windows 7 default alignment.

1048576 (bits) / 4096 (bytes) = 256 (kb) x4 = 1024 (kb)

[sonicsonic]

So if I installed fresh install win 7 then made acronis backup including MBR not sector by sector only data will this restore aligned? Or I shouldn't restore mbr ?Any 1 tried it with acronis and it worked? I ask because of the new firmware coming soon I don't wont to install all over again ...