XP and advanced format (4KB aligned partition) drives

[mikeymikec]

I was reading the SSD sticky thread and came to the bit about XP and 4KB aligned partitions, and a bit of googling just suggests "performance problems" from not partitioning the disk a different way to the way XP usually does it.

Does anyone know what sort of performance problems that might be expected with these newer HDDs? Please note that my question is definitely about XP and newer HDDs, not about SSDs.

 

[Zachboy]

"Newer HDDs"? I've haven't had any serious performance issues with the newer WD HDDs on XP, except that 3TB HDD, which decided to go rogue.....

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[mv2devnull]

Misalignment affects write performance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Format#Advanced_Format_512e

However, some drives do offer "offset" mode that aligns LBA 63 with physical sectors. Besides, re-alignment is an almost trivial one-time procedure; no real repartitioning is required.

 

[mikeymikec]

Misalignment affects write performance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Format#Advanced_Format_512e

I understood that from the bit of googling I did, but I'm not sure how this would effect performance visibly. I'm wondering, for example, whether this might account for an issue I posted about in the last month or two where a chkdsk on a 500GB disk took something like 5 hours, even though I've done a disk check since then on a 500GB disk on a different machine and it took about an hour.