Announcement

**gr8bob** · 09-18-2009, 06:02 PM

As far as I know, partition alignment is only needed when you're installing Windows XP (and certain flavour of linux?)

**Tradesman** · 09-18-2009, 06:08 PM

Yeah, Vista's pretty good w/o aligning and I haven't had a problem yet w/ Win7, and that's actually w/ a variety of SSDs GSkill, OCZ, Patriot and even a few of the lesser names

**butchconner** · 09-18-2009, 06:14 PM

SSD Partition Alignment...

Actually, I have both Vista and Win7 RTM on that machine. BUT...I originally loaded XP on it to load the Vista Upgrade.

Bottom line -- before I started doing things I did use the various programs to check and my SSD was NOT partition aligned before I worked on it.

I understand and basically agree about Vista and Win7 -- but I don't trust M$ enough not to check!!!

Rev

**Tradesman** · 09-18-2009, 06:57 PM

Good thinking - anytime you make a build it's always best to explore anything your not positive about, saves a lot of headaches - especially if you build alot and/or are on a deadline.

**techspec6** · 09-19-2009, 04:32 PM

Using a valid alignment for your SSD drive will not always (but often) show improvements on sequential and random read/write benchmarks. Drive and controller cache sometimes will mask the difference. What a valid alignment does help with is SSD I/O performance. To see those differences, you'd have to setup benchmarks using IOmeter. It's a powerful benchmarking tool.

Also, some have not seen read/write benchmarking differences after a fresh installation, but have noticed faster degradation of the drive performance. This is probably due to the extra writes to the pages/blocks that are split by LBA sector boundaries.

Jason

**butchconner** · 09-26-2009, 08:37 PM

Followup on Performance...

In the time since I originally aligned the partition, I have continued to watch performance on the SSD.

Reads have continued from 210-220 and writes from 95-100.

If it continues to maintain that, I will be very happy. All I'm doing is trimming once a day or so and defragging every great once in a while just in case it might help.

RevBC

P. S. -- Comment to one of the earlier answers -- yes, alignment does matter in all OSes, but some do more than XP or work more efficiently with SSDs. I would guess that if one sets the partition, formats and installs with Vista or Win7, the alignment might be okay. But doubtful me would check just to make sure!!!!!!

bc

**TwoCables** · 09-26-2009, 10:06 PM

Originally posted by butchconner View Post

In the time since I originally aligned the partition, I have continued to watch performance on the SSD.

Reads have continued from 210-220 and writes from 95-100.

If it continues to maintain that, I will be very happy. All I'm doing is trimming once a day or so and defragging every great once in a while just in case it might help.

RevBC

P. S. -- Comment to one of the earlier answers -- yes, alignment does matter in all OSes, but some do more than XP or work more efficiently with SSDs. I would guess that if one sets the partition, formats and installs with Vista or Win7, the alignment might be okay. But doubtful me would check just to make sure!!!!!!

bc

But defragging SSDs is one of the main things that should never be done to an SSD. Besides, defragmentation is only beneficial for hard drives since they utilize a round disk and therefore need data to be arranged on the faster parts of that disk in order to maintain maximum performance. I also understand that defragging is similar to cleaning up your room so that it's easier to find everything, but defragging does not benefit SSDs at all. If it does any good, then I can say it does more harm than good because defragging is essentially performing a massive amount of writes and rewrites.

So, that's why one of the SSD Tweaks is to disable the Windows defragger, and that's also why people recommend to avoid defragging an SSD. After all, an SSD has no similarities to a HDD, and defragging was meant for and created for hard drives.

So please, please, please stop defragging your wonderful SSD!

**butchconner** · 09-27-2009, 07:18 AM

Twocables --

I hear what you are saying, but out among all the stuff I researched while working on this issue, I did find someone who said it was good and gave a fairly reasonable explanation why.

If I can find the reference, I will post it in this thread for your evaluation.

We both recognize that SSDs are relatively new and there's a lot of info going around both good and bad. I hope when people read our comments here they will use common sense and good judgement as you have suggested.

Thanks for your comment.

RevBC

**TwoCables** · 09-27-2009, 12:13 PM

Originally posted by butchconner View Post

Twocables --

I hear what you are saying, but out among all the stuff I researched while working on this issue, I did find someone who said it was good and gave a fairly reasonable explanation why.

If I can find the reference, I will post it in this thread for your evaluation.

We both recognize that SSDs are relatively new and there's a lot of info going around both good and bad. I hope when people read our comments here they will use common sense and good judgement as you have suggested.

Thanks for your comment.

RevBC

I was just thinking that regular defragging could be a good thing for those who can also regularly run Wiper.exe. But for people who don't have any way to undo the bad things that defragging does, defragging is certainly a bad idea. I can't remember the exact details of why defragging is bad, but it left me with mental images of the defragger moving data around and leaving "holes" behind that could not be reused - or "ghost data". So, since Wiper.exe is supposed to free those areas up, I suppose it wouldn't hurt to use a defragger in combination with Wiper.exe.

However, even so, the thought of using a defragger on an SSD kinda makes me uncomfortable seeing as how it is meant for hard drives. But if we end up with people who are regularly defragging their SSD with no loss in performance, or "deterioration" as you adequately put, then we could end up with nice tutorials on how to properly utilize a defragger on a Solid State Disk.

**butchconner** · 09-27-2009, 03:12 PM

Twocables,

I know that the SSD is "memory" as opposed to disk. Disk has to rotate, find sector, etc. When the sectors on a disk are "defragged" and "all lined up" it is faster for the disk to pull all the needed sectors off -- to read -- yada, yada, yada.

I know the SSD is so fast because it only takes it 0.1 or 0.2 milliseconds to go to each memory whatever and get it. The question I have for the gurus is, when the SSD "reads" does it always pick up everything one unit at a time, or if it "is" defragged, does it take 0.1 or 0.2 to say get me # 379-466, which would seem to be faster even operating as an SSD does.

Maybe someone will read this and tell us how the SSD really gets the info from the memory and how that can or cannot be optimized.

RevBC

**Barnacules** · 05-27-2011, 04:12 PM

Can someone post detailed instructions on how to create an aligned partition for the 128gb falcon drive?

**Barnacules** · 05-27-2011, 05:42 PM

Originally posted by Barnacules View Post

Can someone post detailed instructions on how to create an aligned partition for the 128gb falcon drive?

Nevermind, I figured it out

1024k offset when creating the partition in Diskpart.

**misticalone** · 08-21-2011, 11:23 AM

alignment done. could it be no ahci?

So here's my mobo.

Running 4.2A Firmware.
Here's the benchmark after reformat and Parted Magic secure erase (parted magic ran with ahci enable) but would not boot from ssd with AHCI mode

After alignment (settled for 64K)

According to gskill benchmarks i'm missing about 50 MB/s of read speed.
No matter what i did to enable ahci it would not boot.

- with a regedit adding the latest intel matrix drivers and reboot i get a BSOD.

- with a clean slipstreamed ahci drive OS install it would keep rebooting once it gets to the windows logo with AHCI mode enable in the bios.

I'm inclined to blame the mobo.

Any ideas??

**G.SKILL** · 08-21-2011, 07:41 PM

hi misticalone,

if you have problems with switch to IDE/AHCI/RAID mode, please check the link to see solution as Microsoft providing: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976