Partition alignment! Does it matter with mechanical disks?

[Minerva]

When I restore an acronis image of a 2008 server the partition is mis aligned. I know Paragon fixes it and everyone wants to do this with their SSDs. What about 7200 rpm SATA drives? Does the misalignment invoke a penalty too? Particularly with a disk that hosts an active directory?

By the way is there a hack or reg edit for 2008R2 server that allows the write cache to stay turned ON forever on volumes hosting the active directory database? It helps performance and after every reboot it will turn the cache off again. This behavior is annoying and I know the risks already.

 

[Emulex]

hells to the yeah. we've been aligning vm's and 2003 boxens for a long time. sql server really hates misalignment.

 

[Minerva]

Thanks for the heads up. Just ran it on a box and it didn't even take an hour!