Windows 7 Beta/RC and SSDs

[Fedaykin311]

Does Windows 7 correctly partition SSDs or do I need to manually create an offset partition ala XP and Vista?

 

[alcoholbob]

I believe Vista/7 have a 1024KB offset (or thereabouts) which is better than 63.5kb, but I believe 64kb should still be optimal.

 

[BoboKatt]

Can someone clarify that for me? I installed the latest Win7 RC last night on my OCZ SSD. When Win7 was ready and showing my SSD, I simply deleted the old partition from the advanced options and then hit next and off Win7 went and installed.

There was an option to create a partition or format. Do I have to do any of that? I noted when I hit the partion option it gave me an option of size, which seemed to 100% but it then showed 2 partitinons. One very small and one almost the whole drive. Anyhow I deleted both partions and just let Win7 install after that.

Are there any difs?

 

[aka1nas]

You should create the partition from scratch in the Windows Vista/7 installer. The alignment settings are not exposed in a GUI anywhere AFAIK, and creating the partition in the installer will use the default value. As mentioned previously, the default alignment value in XP is terrible for SSDs, but probably good enough for them in Vista/Win7.

If you want to manually set it to an optimal value, you have to boot to a command prompt, use the diskpart utility to create the partition, and then install windows to that existing partition.

 

[alcoholbob]

According to diskpar, after I used Win 7 boot disc to format the drive, the offset is 2048 sectors, which is 1024KB alignment. I would have preferred a 64kb alignment since that is what you typically see in high performance enterprise applications, but since I was selling some of my hard drives it would not have been possible to align it on another disk drive's OS.

My ATTO numbers are down about 25% under 1024KB alignment vs the old 64kb although the random read/write performance is still the same. So for daily applications this is pretty irrelevant.