How important is partition alignment on a HDD?

[wpcoe]

I'm going to replace the stock HDD in my new notebook with a Momentus XT hybrid drive.

My current drive has a 20GB "Recovery Partition," the 100MB "System Partition" that Win7 installs by default, and then my C: Win7 (32-bit Pro) partition and a couple other data partitions.

Is it important to have the partitions on my new hybrid drive aligned? i.e. Is there a performance hit on traditional spindle drives, like there is on SSDs? TBH, I'd never even heard of partition alignment until I started reading SSD threads here.

I'm debating whether to clone the Recovery Partition, but if I do, and if partition alignment is a Good Thing, can I simply create a 20GB, 100MB and 55GB partition with a Win7 DVD and then clone the contents of each of the partitions from my current drive to the new one?

I know that, in general, it's best to reinstall Win7 from scratch, but I just went through a boatload of customization of the system and it'd be nice to not have to repeat it all. Additionally, I'd have to track down all the custom software Acer installs (that I actually use) like the Fn key shortcuts, the fingerprint reader software, etc. Of course, if cloning fails, I'd have to do it anyway, but if it works, I'd be relieved. I'm just not sure about cloning the Recovery Partition and/or the 100MB partition.

Or, even worse <g>, how about I clone my entire *disk* (ISTR that is an option using Acronis Marcrium, isn't it?) onto the new one?

Or, rather than cloning, what about using Win7 Backup to backup up my current C: partition, then installing Win7 from a DVD onto the new drive and restoring my backed up C: partition onto it? Am I overthinking this and making it Rube Goldberg-esque?

 

[Golgatha]

I'm going to replace the stock HDD in my new notebook with a Momentus XT hybrid drive.

My current drive has a 20GB "Recovery Partition," the 100MB "System Partition" that Win7 installs by default, and then my C: Win7 (32-bit Pro) partition and a couple other data partitions.

Is it important to have the partitions on my new hybrid drive aligned? i.e. Is there a performance hit on traditional spindle drives, like there is on SSDs? TBH, I'd never even heard of partition alignment until I started reading SSD threads here.

I'm debating whether to clone the Recovery Partition, but if I do, and if partition alignment is a Good Thing, can I simply create a 20GB, 100MB and 55GB partition with a Win7 DVD and then clone the contents of each of the partitions from my current drive to the new one?

I know that, in general, it's best to reinstall Win7 from scratch, but I just went through a boatload of customization of the system and it'd be nice to not have to repeat it all. Additionally, I'd have to track down all the custom software Acer installs (that I actually use) like the Fn key shortcuts, the fingerprint reader software, etc. Of course, if cloning fails, I'd have to do it anyway, but if it works, I'd be relieved. I'm just not sure about cloning the Recovery Partition and/or the 100MB partition.

Or, even worse <g>, how about I clone my entire *disk* (ISTR that is an option using Acronis Marcrium, isn't it?) onto the new one?

Or, rather than cloning, what about using Win7 Backup to backup up my current C: partition, then installing Win7 from a DVD onto the new drive and restoring my backed up C: partition onto it? Am I overthinking this and making it Rube Goldberg-esque?

You can clone the whole disk and the alignment and partitions will be preserved with Acronis's latest 2011 version or the most recent 2010 version. I've personally done it with a couple of SSD upgrades within the last few months.

 

[sub.mesa]

A HDD does not care for misalignment, unless it is a 4K sector HDD (like WD EARS / Samsung F4) or it is part of a striping RAID array.

Traditional (single) HDD obey the sector size; 512-bytes. Thus they are always perfectly aligned.

 

[tweakboy]

Also to note, I formatted the disk and left it at default allocation size, Will it put 4k by itself, or was I supposed to do that manually ?

 

[tweakboy]

After doing reserach I saw Fry's selling SATA II cable and saying 3Gbps ,,,

Can this be the problem, I need SATA II cable ?

 

[Zap]

Also to note, I formatted the disk and left it at default allocation size, Will it put 4k by itself, or was I supposed to do that manually ?

If you are using Windows 7, it is fine. If not, then an SSD or 4k drive will need to be aligned manually.

After doing reserach I saw Fry's selling SATA II cable and saying 3Gbps ,,,

Can this be the problem, I need SATA II cable ?

Problem with what? If the cable is faulty, then you will have massive problems. If the cable is not faulty, then everything is fine physically, whether or not aligned properly.

 

[Concillian]

Or, even worse <g>, how about I clone my entire *disk* (ISTR that is an option using Acronis Marcrium, isn't it?) onto the new one?

This is by far the easiest way to do it. I just cloned my wife's hard drive last week.

source 160GB --> new 320 GB

Here's how:
- Download ANY liveCD linux .iso (knoppix, for example. Ubuntu is kinda wacky in the root privelages, but any will work)
- Burn it to a disc

- Figure out which drive is which. Most likely one will be sda and the other will be sdb. If you don't know your way around a command line, there should be a GUI option when the CD boots.

- then you do a bit by bit clone with the dd command:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=4096

that's it. Walk away for a couple hours (or leave it overnight) and it will clone one drive to another. It makes no output until it's done, just be patient. The blinking light you'll have indicating HD activity is your confirmation it's working. MAKE SURE the "if=" drive is the one with the data you want to clone and the "of=" drive is the one you want to move data to. Get it backwards and you've junked the data you want.

This does a full clonee of one drive to another. MBR, partitions, everything is exactly the same on both drives. If you do this from smaller to larger drive, you can re-size in Vista or Win7 after you boot the new drive. You can also do this to backup a drive to another drive. All you need is a Linux bootable CD ("Live CD") and very basic knowledge to figure out what linux is calling each drive.

The "bs=" is supposedly faster now at higher values. Use 8192 or 16384 if you want, just don't leave it default, as that will default to 512, which takes 2-3x longer than 4096. I got like 55MB/sec when I did the clone last week at 4k. this gives you some idea about how long it will take (~1hr per 160GB or so on mechanical drives).

If you regularly work on computers, you're doing yourself a big favor in learning how to do this. Saves money (from buying Ghost or Acronis), time, and is something you can probably make use of next decade just as well as today.

 

[darckhart]

if u install w7 from scratch, it takes of everything automagically. next, if you clone it bit by bit, everything is the same as the original, which if you installed w7, was done automagically. hooray! now if u bought those semi new drives that emulate the sectors for winxp, it would be another story, but you're not using winxp, so who cares. hooray!

 

[wpcoe]

If I understand this correctly, paying attention to partition alignment on spindle HDDs is not a concern, it's only with an SSD that it needs to be addressed.

If so, I'm going to first attempt to clone the entire drive with the free Acronis that I have. If that fails, I'm going to take a stab at Concillian's Linux suggestion. (I'm just more comfortable with Windows.)

Am I better off:

(a) cloning with the source HDD remaining in the notebook and attaching the new bare HDD via an external 2.5" USB2 enclosure, or

(b) attaching both HDDs as external drives to my desktop computer with the bare drive attached via an eSATA port on my mobo, and the source HDD on a USB2 port?

i.e. Will using eSATA for the writing make the process faster? Or, will I have greater overall speed from reading the source drive via an internal SATA connection in the notebook?

How much does processor speed factor in the cloning process? My notebook has an i3-380UM (1.33Ghz, dual-core) and my desktop has an i5-760 (3.65Ghz, quad-core) processor.

 

[sub.mesa]

@Concillian
bs is the blocksize; you can use any value here as long as it is a multiple of 512 bytes. It won't change a thing on how the data will be written to disk. For this purpose, there is no reason to use a bs value lower than a million bytes, such as: bs=1M (under linux) or bs=1m (under BSD). This would transfer the data in chunks of 1 megabyte. This greatly increases speed. You are just making your HDD crazy with bs=512 which is the default.

Thus, bs parameter has nothing to with partition alignment. I recommend bs=1M for optimal transfers. In some cases 100MiB would be faster, but keep in mind the bs has to fit in memory so don't make it too big.

@wpcoe: cloning and imaging software is 100&#37; disk-bound; your CPU shouldn't bottleneck it. Regular imaging software (including dd) would do sequential read/write, so goes at the maximum speed your HDD is capable of.