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Partition Alignment


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Since this thread makes no sense, I thought I'd consolidate some info into this first post.

 

JohntechUSA tested the Corsair M64 SSD Drive as a single drive and didn't find any improvement with an aligned partiton versus an unaligned partition. I'm assuming the samsung cache somehow buffers the difference.

 

That being said, I'd like to see some 3rd party results if anyone wants to participate. Both single disk and RAID setups, particularly drives other than the M64 since that's been tested already. Post your findings in this thread please.

 

If necessary, I'll write a small guide to aligning partitions. I'm not sure at this point that it's necessary since it doesn't seem to be required by Samsung controllers.

 

By default, windows XP OS and earlier will misalign the first partition. Windows 2003 Server and beyond (includes Vista and W7) will align partitions created within the installer by default.

 

Jason

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  • 2 weeks later...
if you use Vista or higher it does it correctly (think XP does to)

 

Disk cloning software is an different matter Acronis*True*Image*Home should do it correctly

 

Windows XP aligns partitions to a 63 sector (31.5k) offset by default which is NOT aligned. Users of XP will see a performance increase in an aligned partition versus an unaligned partition.

 

Vista and W7 will align the partition correctly if it is done from a raw or unpartitioned drive within the setup or OS itself. If you upgrade to Vista or W7 from WinXP or have used imaging software that doesn't preserve alignment, then you are running at a much lower performance level than your drive is capable of.

 

Jason

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  • Corsair Employee
There's no information about aligning partitions on these forums. Why not?

A: There is no need with our drives in most cases and should someone have an issue with their drive the F.A.Q covers how to recover the drive.

 

If you have a specific problem we will be happy to address it but the information as presented is covered in the F.A.Q.

My suggestion would be to purchase one of our drives instead of another manufacturers and we will be happy to help you!

 

 

P.S. I have merged all of your posts to one thread so we can keep them more on track!

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techspec6

With the Corsair M64 SSD Drive and with the partition of set at 32,256 which was from a default format and with the drive running the O.S. In HD Bench

1st Run:

Read: 148621

Write: 92252

RRead: 76133

Rwrite: 10690

 

Second Run:

Read: 152380

Write: 92169

RRead: 78890

Rwrite: 19856

Advertised Spec:

170 MB/s sequential read

100 MB/s sequential write

I would say this is running pretty close and a bit low because it is the Boot drive, will test it on another system to verify but I have done that before and it will bench at the spec. on this drive when it is not the Boot drive.

Is there a specifif tect you wanted to be ran?

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what is the system spec and what SSD is it (some one posted m64)

 

if it is the m64 be happy you not got stuttering issues (as i believe that drive is based off the JMiron it has no cache on it)

 

as long as the access speeds are low(latency) Data rate speeds are not that important i have got an Corsair S128 and its read speads are around 90mb read and 70 Write, and that is operating far faster then my then my hdds i have used before (thats real world use not benchmarks)

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Yes indeed interesting results!

He used the CMFSSD-64N1 SSD Drive with an ASUS M2N32-SLI and an AMD 9750 CPU 4.0 Gig of DDR800 Corsair memory, I don't think he posted that but I got this from an Email he sent in. It was an experiment to help with what Techspec6 was stating about the thread topic.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hey Techspec6 how are you good I hope?

Follow up on this thread I was able to obtain another M-64 SSD Drive and I have been working on Raid configurations.

But the results show the best configurtation with 2 M-64 SSD's in RAID was with the Raid set to 128K Cluster and the Format with 32K Alocation and all of the testing was done on the same system but with Windows 7. I am working on some testing with other makes of 64 Gig SSD's to see if that correlates to the size of the drive I am guessing it will but will know more later on

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HDBench_M64_12KC_32KA.jpg.490730b6b55a0eb051ec8b5773eefb24.jpg

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Hey John,

 

I have another request. Could you bench the RAID 0 array with IOmeter and see if there is a difference between an aligned array and an unaligned array? I have read from Samsung engineers that there is an advantage to aligning a single disk as well as a RAID 0 partition with IO performance. I'm curious if that is still the case, since the documents were over a year old.

 

Jason

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