The_Nephilim Posted April 19, 2012 Share Posted April 19, 2012 Hi All, I just bought my First SSD it is a Corsair Force 3 Sata3.. Well I first looked at the Thread here and set up as suggested but I saw on numerous other sites that the SSD needs to be Aligned... Well I did this and the suggestions in the FAQ. I was wondering is it Really Required to ALIGN the SSD to get it running Optimally or is aligning Unnecassary?? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FoLmEr Posted April 19, 2012 Share Posted April 19, 2012 If the drive is misaligned it will be slower at writing, and it will also tax the drive further because of the increased write overhead the drive needs to do in order to do normal operations. But I wonder if you've checked whether your drive is misaligned or not? Mind you, a standard windows 7 (and Vista, probably) installation from scratch is aligned by default and needs no further attention. Alignment only becomes an issue if you restore an old HDD image with imaging software which doesn't correct the alignment automatically. Or, of course, if you like tinkering and manually entered the partition starting offset of your disk and chose an improper value. Or installing windows XP or older. Or probably other OS's. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G50EED Posted April 19, 2012 Share Posted April 19, 2012 An easy way to see if your drive is aligned or not is to run "msinfo32" from Start|Run. Choose "Components", "Storage", "Disks" and find your SSD. Look for "Partition Starting Offset" and see that it is divisible by 1024. If so, it is aligned. If not, it is not. The usual value for an aligned SSD is 1,048,576 bytes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The_Nephilim Posted April 19, 2012 Author Share Posted April 19, 2012 OK I will check that next time but I beleive it was already aligned as I did NOT do the alignment this time and the number checks out to be 1,048,576.. THNX and I guess if installing win 7 the alignment will be fine?? Now about that image if I install win 7 and then run a backup from an image will that mess with the alignment?? Or what is the Procedure to backup a current SSD then image it?? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Toasted Posted April 20, 2012 Share Posted April 20, 2012 This may help http://forum.corsair.com/forums/showthread.php?t=85344 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arizona Willie Posted April 20, 2012 Share Posted April 20, 2012 I did a clean install of Windows 7 64 bit on my SSD and the Partition Starting Offset is: 105,906,176 bytes. It is divisible by 1024. Comes out to 103,424. Way way off of what the forums says it should be. But my read / writes both check over 500 mb/sec. Do I need to do something? Or just let it ride as long as it works fine? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
richardd43 Posted April 20, 2012 Share Posted April 20, 2012 An easy way to align your drive is with diskpart which is already installed on your computer. Run diskpart.exe 1 list disk 2 select disk x with x being the number given for your ssd 3 clean (this destroys all partition/volume data on the disk) 4 create partition primary align=1024 5 active 6 format fs=ntfs quick 7 exit Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FoLmEr Posted April 20, 2012 Share Posted April 20, 2012 I did a clean install of Windows 7 64 bit on my SSD and the Partition Starting Offset is: 105,906,176 bytes. It is divisible by 1024. Comes out to 103,424. Way way off of what the forums says it should be. But my read / writes both check over 500 mb/sec. Do I need to do something? Or just let it ride as long as it works fine? As already mentioned, a fresh install of Windows7 (and vista and 8) is fine; there's nothing more you need to do. Your writes are also up to spec, which they wouldn't be if there was anything wrong. Enjoy your drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FoLmEr Posted April 20, 2012 Share Posted April 20, 2012 An easy way to align your drive is with diskpart which is already installed on your computer. Run diskpart.exe 1 list disk 2 select disk x with x being the number given for your ssd 3 clean (this destroys all partition/volume data on the disk) 4 create partition primary align=1024 5 active 6 format fs=ntfs quick 7 exit Aren't you really just telling people how to install Windows7 from scratch in a slightly more complicated way than necessary, since a fresh win7 install automatically aligns the disk correctly? Maybe I'm misunderstanding your post, but you're almost writing it as if it was a fix for a misaligned drive, which it isn't. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G50EED Posted April 20, 2012 Share Posted April 20, 2012 I did a clean install of Windows 7 64 bit on my SSD and the Partition Starting Offset is: 105,906,176 bytes. It is divisible by 1024. Comes out to 103,424. Way way off of what the forums says it should be. But my read / writes both check over 500 mb/sec. Do I need to do something? Or just let it ride as long as it works fine? You're fine. I killed the hidden 100MB system partition that Windows 7 sets up and you're reading the partition you can see which begins after that hidden system partition. It's divisible by 1024 so you're good but as has already been stated on a fresh install Windows 7 will align the drive properly. I moved my Windows install to my SSD from a mechanical HDD so that's why I had to deal with the alignment issue and learn about killing the hidden 100MB system partition (which still bugs the heck out of me that Microsoft does that). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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