Vista/Win7 SSD Alignment - Yes or No?

[Budwise]

My 120GB Vertex arrives today and I will be installing Vista X64 or Windows 7 X64 on it. Ive seen so many differing recommendations on whether or not to do a disk alignment with Vista or W7. Whats the final word here on XS?

[XS Janus]

I wouldn't...
Use it as it is. Chances are that any of the benefits will only be shown in Synthetic benchmarks.
I stand by it until some one disproves me and actually shows Vertex vs X25-M in some real life scenarios and usage experience...

[Mechromancer]

TheRookie and Tony from OCZ have a very good explanation here: http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...ad.php?t=48309

That should answer ALL your questions regarding the subject.

[Halk]

I wouldn't...
Use it as it is. Chances are that any of the benefits will only be shown in Synthetic benchmarks.
I stand by it until some one disproves me and actually shows Vertex vs X25-M in some real life scenarios and usage experience...

I completely disagree with you. Alignment is important (vs misaligned) and the results will likely not show in a synthetic benchmark but will show in real world performance.

http://download.microsoft.com/downlo...T558_WH08.pptx

Have a read at what Microsoft say.

[zanzabar]

alignment and properly formatting on the command line are vary important, but more important is making windows not cashe anything to the ssd

[Budwise]

I aligned using diskpart from the Windows 7 CD and aligned to 64. So far its pretty impressive.

[Griff805]

I completely disagree with you. Alignment is important (vs misaligned) and the results will likely not show in a synthetic benchmark but will show in real world performance.

http://download.microsoft.com/downlo...T558_WH08.pptx

Have a read at what Microsoft say.

"Misaligned partition can degrade device’s performance down to 50% caused by read-modify-write"

There was a single statement about performance of aligned vs unaligned. Not a whole lot of evidence to go with it, or even an explanation of what that statement means exactly. What kind of performance is he talking about? Where'd he get the 50% from? Howcome non-JMicron ssd don't seem to need to be aligned for max performance? Have any X25 owners experienced an increase in performance with alignment?

I think there needs to be some more in depth research into this with more sources than just a single slideshow from Microsoft.

[lowfat]

Howcome non-JMicron ssd don't seem to need to be aligned for max performance? Have any X25 owners experienced an increase in performance with alignment?

The whole alignment thing confused the hell out of me or else I would try

[alfaunits]

I think Intel SSDs have built in knowledge of NTFS and ext2/3 to figure whether they are aligned or not and act accordingly.
It's also possible that Intel uses a very large base block, i.e. not 512 bytes but.. say 20KB. With larger sizes, the misalignment is less noticable.

Speaking of which, it seems Windows Server 2003 aligns to 64 sectors...

[FoxRacR17]

I asked the same question in a thread a week or two ago and everyone was saying that vista automatically aligns correctly if you install the os straight to the ssd. Dont know if that is actually true though.

[zanzabar]

I asked the same question in a thread a week or two ago and everyone was saying that vista automatically aligns correctly if you install the os straight to the ssd. Dont know if that is actually true though.

thats only with native sp1 disks

[HDCHOPPER]

??? vista & W7 both align a correct interger that being said thier is room for improvement .. slight as it may be .

xp on the other hand doesnt ... might try xp sp1 disk only it might ? it also lets you use more ram iirc(sp1 only) than xp sp2 or 3

[alfaunits]

XP SP1????? HAHAHHA that wasn't in use for half a decade now SP2 was the fastest adopted "OS release" ever...

[HDCHOPPER]

wasnt takling about speed , was talking about alignment lol

[Halk]

There was a single statement about performance of aligned vs unaligned. Not a whole lot of evidence to go with it, or even an explanation of what that statement means exactly. What kind of performance is he talking about? Where'd he get the 50% from? Howcome non-JMicron ssd don't seem to need to be aligned for max performance? Have any X25 owners experienced an increase in performance with alignment?

I think there needs to be some more in depth research into this with more sources than just a single slideshow from Microsoft.

The 50% is worst case only and not very likely to happen.

Basically there's 4KB size areas on the SSD. If you're writing 4KB blocks to the SSD then it's best to line them up. The drive cannot do anything less than 4KB so for a 4KB operation that's not aligned it has to do two block operations, rather than one. Where it's a big file it still needs to do one extra operation, but since it's doing 10,000 already it makes almost no difference. That's where the 50% comes from.

Sure it's a bit theoretical, but I see no reason why it's not correct.

The reason it's so important on JMicron controllers is that they stutter if they can't cope with the workload they're asked to do, aligning the partition will reduce the workload for small files. All other SSDs should benefit from it.

[FoxRacR17]

So would I notice a big increase in performance if I change my x25-m alignment to 64kb instead of 32kb?

[Halk]

Not unless it's nearly 32 rather than actually 32.

[Budwise]

is 64 the ideal alignment for Vista/Win7?

[FoxRacR17]

Not unless it's nearly 32 rather than actually 32.

I used diskpar like in that thread at the ocz forums to make sure that I set my drive to a 32kb alignment. So i'm wondering if I should redo it all with a 64kb alignment.

[_ChillaX_]

Kinda funny though, I installed windows7 beta 7000 on my ocz solid series 30gb, and formated the drive in the win7 installer. It is unaligned now, using 63kb size. Not a big problem to reformat but still I think it's strange

[Thule]

is 64 the ideal alignment for Vista/Win7?

If you use single drive 64 is ideal.But if you want to raid 128 recommended.here is my 128 offset aligned raid array.3 x ocz core v2;

[luie]

In addition,
Diskpart rounds up and uses 'kb'.
Diskpar uses 'sectors' instead of 'kb' and is exacted. (conversion: 64 sectors = 32kb)

[tbone8ty]

what about using Acronis to make a mirror copy of my drive now and putting it on a new SSD? would this screw things up or can i align it still? or should hook it up as an external and check firmware and align before making mirror copy.


got the Kingston SSDNow V Series SNV425-S2/64GB

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820139132