No need to realign drive when reinstalling Windows -- right?

[amdhunter]

I installed Windows 7 last night to play with it on my SSD, but decided to reinstall my copy of Vista instead.

Since the drive is already properly aligned, can I just pop in my Vista CD, format the drive over and install as normal? I don't need to realign it right? (I am not partitioning the drive, just quick formatting it.)

 

[Elixer]

realign? Huh?

If you want, yes, pop in the vista CD, and install. Or you can make it dual boot, so you have both win 7 & vista.

 

[amdhunter]

I went ahead and installed a clean copy of Vista without realigning the drive and the drive remains aligned properly. I don't really know why I thought it would go "off" since I wasn't repartitioning.

 

[Snooper]

I have to ask: what in the world is "realigning the drive" supposed to mean???

 

[amdhunter]

Originally posted by: Snooper
I have to ask: what in the world is "realigning the drive" supposed to mean???

http://www.ocztechnologyforum....showthread.php?t=50376

look under "What you need to know part 2"

Pretty much it optimizes the partition table for SSD use. Aligning a drive is more common for RAID, but I guess squeezing every bit of performance out of an SSD can't be bad.

 

[Hans5849]

After doing some reading, I think that realigning drives is the SSD equivalent of defragging. It's something you do once in a while to help performance.

 

[taltamir]

Hans, you are completely wrong. and you really shouldn't defrag any drive, SSD or spindle.

On an SSD, when you PARTITION it you want to CORRECTLY align the PARTITION.
You can then reformat and reinstall a million times, it will never need "realigning" as long as you do not delete the PARTITION in question.

Also, installing win7 on a badly aligned partition is not going to magically align it, you have to delete the partition and use win7 to create a new partition for it to fix to the bad alignment.

 

[alcoholbob]

If you formatted the drive with the 7/Vista boot installer the drive should be aligned properly...it's only with XP where the alignment is completely off. But supposedly aligning drives to a 64kb stripe is optimal for SSDs.

According to the below link, you can have performance gains for aligning a mechanical hard disk as well.

http://sqlblog.com/blogs/linch...disk-misalignment.aspx