Don't understand Samsung Align Tool

duragezic

Lifer
Oct 11, 1999
11,234
4
81
I recently bought a Samsung F4 2 TB drive (HD204UI). I've read that Windows XP can't properly format/handle the new 4k sector formatting, but mine seems fine. XP Disk Management created and formatted partitions, and data I copied to it seems to playback just fine.

Currently it's partitioned and formatted in XP as:
partition 0: 341 gb (empty)
partition 1: 1480 gb (some data)

I did it this way so I'm set up for a future Win 7 install on this drive (on partition 0) since I'd rather not have to resize/redo partitions that have data on them.

Anyway, I've read a few threads and it seems like the tool is mandatory, especially if you are creating more than one partition. I guess everything is working fine for me right now, but my worry is if I'll have any issue with Windows 7.

Like I read that ideally you use Windows 7 to partition and format a 4k drive, and once that's done, it can be used in XP fine but that you shouldn't make any change to it with XP. Since I partitioned and formatted in XP, is that like not as good of performance or storage efficiency, or will I have issues with Win 7?
 

Elixer

Lifer
May 7, 2002
10,371
762
126
What does the align tool show ?
If it isn't aligned, then usually, things get slow, sometimes, really slow depending on how bad the alignment is.
Use HDtach or Atto or something like that, and see what the speeds are.