Category: Partition Alignment

Dell Recommends Paragon Alignment Tool(PAT) for Advanced Format Hard Disk Drives Usage

Do you know if partition alignment is really significant for advanced format hard drives usage?

Dell – the pioneering developer in home, small business and enterprise computing – talks about desktop system image support for advanced format hard drives for their notebooks and shares its experience with the wide range of notebook users. Dell considers partition alignment as required for older Operating Systems and recommended for new Operating Systems in order to insure proper HDD performance and imaging between HDDs of differing sector sizes.

The instructions for installing and using the Paragon Alignment Tool now available to download from the Dell Support website in Dell Drivers and Downloads for all types of Dell products’ users – from home users to small businesses and enterprise IT.

Visit Dell’s website to learn more tips in advanced format hdd-s usage along with Partition Alignment Options!

Why Misaligned Partitions are a Problem for SSD.

The Misaligned partitions problem is even more important for SSD drives than for traditional hard disk drives. Many modern SSD drives have an internal memory page size 4096 bytes or larger accordingly to 4K size, which are some analogue for 4K sectors. Thus all previously mentioned problems are the same for SSD partitions alignment.

This issue of SSD misalignment was highlighted in a recent OCZ forum where it was stated:

Take note here, partition alignment with SSD is the most important factor you have to deal with when installing your new drive. Tuning the drive’s alignment can add 30 to 50% more performance so failing to apply the correct alignment could ruin the experience you have with the drive.

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There is one crucial SSD issue besides file system speed decline (which is not so noticeable in comparison to traditional HDD). It is the SSD memory cells degradation after some amount of write operations. So if partitions on SSD are misaligned beside downgraded system speed you put your solid state drive in danger. After partitions alignment, PAT eliminates all redundant read/write operations and thus provides speed boost and grants the SSD a longer lifetime.

Is SSD alignment an issue for you? Find out here. Continue reading Why Misaligned Partitions are a Problem for SSD.