SSD / HDD Alignment made wonders for me!

Berryracer

Platinum Member
Oct 4, 2006
2,779
1
81
Today I was running the AS SSD Benchmark and I noticed that there is a warning message saying: "31K BAD" so I googled it and found out that happens due to misalignment in the SSD/HDD sectors or whatever... due to new drives using a 4096 Byte cluster size and the OS telling the SSD/HDD to write 512 Byte clusters (my understanding may be wrong but the whole point is about cluster misalignment)

The solution was to either format my SSD in a low level format or to use the Paragon Alignment Tool which I did, the whole process took about 15 to 20 mins on my 256 GB SSD (I chose the fast method without power failure recovery)

I was thinking this is some gimmick from Paragon to get money but it isn't!

look at the stores for your self!

AS SSD Benchmark with IRST 11.5.0.1207 (Before Alignment)



AS SSD Benchmark with IRST 11.5.0.1207 (After Alignment)



CrystalDiskMark with IRST 11.5.0.1207 (Before Alignment)



CrystalDiskMark with IRST 11.5.0.1207 (After Alignment)


 

bononos

Diamond Member
Aug 21, 2011
3,921
177
106
Shouldn't all drives be automatically aligned nowadays when you partition/format them. What OS are you running?
 

Bubbaleone

Golden Member
Nov 20, 2011
1,803
4
76
Today I was running the AS SSD Benchmark and I noticed that there is a warning message saying: "31K BAD" so I googled it and found out that happens due to misalignment in the SSD/HDD sectors or whatever... due to new drives using a 4096 Byte cluster size and the OS telling the SSD/HDD to write 512 Byte clusters (my understanding may be wrong but the whole point is about cluster misalignment).....

The LITEONIT LAT-256M2S ATA isn't an advanced format drive; it uses a conventional 512 byte sector size. So the problem you've encountered isn't due to 4K sector misalignment. It was due the drive being aligned at 31K, which is not evenly divisble by a 512 byte sector size i.e., 4096/512=8, 2048/512=4, 1024/512=2, but 31,744/512=62. Note that the Paragon alignment tool set the offset on your SSD at 2048.

This problem arises when users manually partition the drive, prior to installing the OS, but fail to specify an offset that's evenly divisible by 512 bytes. It also occurs when restoring a disk image created by software that didn't preserve the correct alignment, even though the image was made from a correctly aligned drive.

The native Windows 7 imaging utility, recent versions of Acronis and Paragon (among several others) software will all preserve correct alignment when creating an image or backup. The Windows 7 installer will automatically set the correct offset only when a fresh installation is done on an unallocated drive, or a manually partitioned drive that's already correctly offset.


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Berryracer

Platinum Member
Oct 4, 2006
2,779
1
81
The LITEONIT LAT-256M2S ATA isn't an advanced format drive; it uses a conventional 512 byte sector size. So the problem you've encountered isn't due to 4K sector misalignment. It was due the drive being aligned at 31K, which is not evenly divisble by a 512 byte sector size i.e., 4096/512=8, 2048/512=4, 1024/512=2, but 31,744/512=62. Note that the Paragon alignment tool set the offset on your SSD at 2048.

This problem arises when users manually partition the drive, prior to installing the OS, but fail to specify an offset that's evenly divisible by 512 bytes. It also occurs when restoring a disk image created by software that didn't preserve the correct alignment, even though the image was made from a correctly aligned drive.

The native Windows 7 imaging utility, recent versions of Acronis and Paragon (among several others) software will all preserve correct alignment when creating an image or backup. The Windows 7 installer will automatically set the correct offset only when a fresh installation is done on an unallocated drive, or a manually partitioned drive that's already correctly offset.


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wow very informative post man! you hit the nail on the head! I wouldn't have even expected such a profesional response from LITEONIT's support! not that they even bothered answering any of my emails in the past
 

Miramonti

Lifer
Aug 26, 2000
28,651
100
91
The LITEONIT LAT-256M2S ATA isn't an advanced format drive; it uses a conventional 512 byte sector size. So the problem you've encountered isn't due to 4K sector misalignment. It was due the drive being aligned at 31K, which is not evenly divisble by a 512 byte sector size i.e., 4096/512=8, 2048/512=4, 1024/512=2, but 31,744/512=62. Note that the Paragon alignment tool set the offset on your SSD at 2048.

This problem arises when users manually partition the drive, prior to installing the OS, but fail to specify an offset that's evenly divisible by 512 bytes. It also occurs when restoring a disk image created by software that didn't preserve the correct alignment, even though the image was made from a correctly aligned drive.

The native Windows 7 imaging utility, recent versions of Acronis and Paragon (among several others) software will all preserve correct alignment when creating an image or backup. The Windows 7 installer will automatically set the correct offset only when a fresh installation is done on an unallocated drive, or a manually partitioned drive that's already correctly offset.


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That sums it up pretty well. Most issues I've had were from previous versions of acronis not properly restoring images onto correctly aligned drives. The annoying part was that ssd's have been out for years and it took them years and required upgraded versions to account for this.