840 Pro Alignment Fresh Win7 install

[Flanno]

Installed Win7 on a new 840 pro the other day and when I ran 'FSUTIL FSINFO NTFSINFO C:' on it, it reports 512 bytes per sector, and 512 bytes per physical sector. I always thought Win7 during setup optimized SSD's for 4k alignment ?

I ran the same command on my Seagate 3tb storage drive which I formatted in Windows as 4096 allocation unit size, and it gave back 512 bytes per sector, BUT as expected it reported 4096 bytes per physical sector.

Should I reinstall Win7 on my ssd, and is there a way to force 4k alignment ?

Thanks

 

[Deleted member 138126]

I think you are confusing different terms. Sector and physical sector are drive-specific and are not something you can pick when formatting a drive. Most drives are 512 bytes per sector; some of the newer large drives are 4k sector drives, but this is nothing to do with partition alignment. Are you mixing up sector size with the NTFS cluster size?

To check partition alignment:

diskpart
list disk
select disk x (where x is one of the disks from the previous command)
list partition

This will show you the partition offset. As long as it is 1024 KB you are good to go.

 

[Flanno]

Your right mate. Doh

So I checked my 3 drives. Looks like the 2 SSD's have 1024k offset on the primary partition while the HDD has a 17kb offset.

Samsung 840 Pro Boot Drive Windows 7
Partition 1 primary 100meg 1024k offset
Partition 2 primary 214gb 101mb offset

Samsung 840 Pro Game Drive
Partition 1 primary 214gb 1024k offset

Seagate 3TB Data Drive GPT
Partition 1 Reserverd 128mb 17k offset
Partition 2 Primary 2794GB 129mb offset

 

[Deleted member 138126]

Haven't had much to do with GPT disks, but try this from the command line:

wmic partition get BlockSize, StartingOffset, Name, Index

You will get something like this:

BlockSize Index Name StartingOffset
512 0 Disk #1, Partition #0 32256
512 0 Disk #2, Partition #0 32256
512 0 Disk #3, Partition #0 32256
512 0 Disk #4, Partition #0 1048576
512 0 Disk #0, Partition #0 32256
512 1 Disk #0, Partition #1 41126400

As long as each offset is cleanly divisible by the BlockSize, you should be golden. e.g. 41126400 / 512 = 80325 - that means the partition is aligned on sector boundaries, which is what you want. If it was a non-integer like 80325.25 then you would need to align the partition.

So you're good already on the two SSDs, just check the Seagate, and ignore the 128mb partition, it's only the big Primary partition that you need to worry about.