SSD/HDD Alignment

[McCormack]

I migrated my WIN XP OS from an HDD to an SSD and aligned the SSD using GParted, and now I'm migrating the OS back to an HDD... do I have to realign my HDD back to HDD specs for optimum efficiency, or will the SSD alignment be OK for an HDD?

 

[corkyg]

Why are you migrating instead of cloning? If you clone with good cloneware, alignment is good either way.

 

[McCormack]

I thought migrating and cloning were the same thing. I cloned my OS from my SSD to an external hard drive and then transferred the OS from the external HDD to the HDD that I now have installed in my computer.

As an aside, I ran AS SSD benchmark and it shows:

pciide - bad
31K - bad

 

[Elixer]

In short, no, no need to "align" the data on the HD.
The only reason it needs to be done on the SSD is because of the way the data is accessed.

*edit, D'OH!
I forgot about 512 byte sector schemes and AF drives which use 4096 byte sectors that most new drives have.

 

[McCormack]

OK, thanks.

 

[McCormack]

Just for yucks I ran the 'Align All Partitions' option from the Mini Tool Partition Recovery program and now some of the gliches that I was experiencing on my computer have cleared up, so perhaps there is some benefit to having an HDD specific alignment on an HDD.

 

[CiPHER]

You DO need to align for modern harddrives! Only older harddrives of <1TB often do not need alignment, because those are classic drives with 512-byte sectorsize.

Modern harddrives are so called 'Advanced Format' harddrives - also known as 512e. This means they pretend to be 512-byte sector harddrives, but internally they are 4096 byte (4K) sectorsize. They will be compatible with anything, but will show much lower write performance if misaligned. So alignment certainly is an issue for harddrives - not just SSDs.

 

[bononos]

I migrated my WIN XP OS from an HDD to an SSD and aligned the SSD using GParted, and now I'm migrating the OS back to an HDD... do I have to realign my HDD back to HDD specs for optimum efficiency, or will the SSD alignment be OK for an HDD?

Gparted doesn't align properly for legacy reasons which is why its not a good tool for unexperienced users. That was probably the cause of your problems which you fixed using another utility.

 

[Seba]

At least when you make a new partition, GParted does align it properly, starting with sector 2048.

That forum thread is about modifying an existing partition. And also is quite old (from 3 years ago), so it may be outdated.

 

[bononos]

At least when you make a new partition, GParted does align it properly, starting with sector 2048.

That forum thread is about modifying an existing partition. And also is quite old (from 3 years ago), so it may be outdated.

Yes you're right, it was about modifying old partitions.

 

[McCormack]

Gparted doesn't align properly for legacy reasons which is why its not a good tool for unexperienced users. That was probably the cause of your problems which you fixed using another utility.

My SSD worked fine after aligning with Gparted and it wasn't until I went back to using an HDD that I started experiencing glitches.