Do mechanical hard drives benefit from being aligned?

[jrichrds]

I used Acronis Disk Director (latest version) to partition my SSD and 1TB Samsung F3 HD103SJ hard drive (original Samsung, not rebadged Seagate). Using msinfo32 in Win7, when dividing offset by 4096, my SSD is properly aligned but my mechanical hard drive isn't (1,050,624 / 4096 = 256.5).

Should I be using a different divisor for mechanical hard drives that aren't of the "Advanced Format" variety? And/or would there be any benefit to aligning it so it's divisible by 4K?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

...iirc, no.

 

[alexruiz]

If the drive is advanced format, yes, needs to be aligned. The spinpoint F3 is NOT AF, so you will be fine 🙂

 

[BFG10K]

You only need to align drives if they’re advanced format and:

• You’re running XP.
• You’re running Vista/7 and your cloning utility doesn’t know how to align partitions automatically, which Acronis does.

So the answer to your question is no.

 

[Auric]

Drive manufacturers provide free automatic alignment tools (from Acronis and Paragon) so... don't make it complicated? 😛

 

[bryanl]

If the drive is advanced format, yes, needs to be aligned.

Unless it's a non-Samsung Seagate advanced format drive, which handles misalignment without any time penalty.