Is my SSD partition aligned correctly?

toon_mad · 22 Jun 2012 at 20:49

So today I got my first SSD fitted (128Gb Samsung 830). PC would not recognise it at first, I had to change the sata that came with it and that fixed that.

I went ahead and created another partition in the end after reading pros/cons, for me it makes it easier to organise everything, so I have:

C:\ 30.5Gb
D:\ 88.7Gb
E:\ 232Gb (250 Gb Sata HDD)
F:\ 465Gb (500Gb Sata HDD)

I like to keep my data away from the Windows drive as it makes formatting easier as don't have to worry about backing up files etc.

I have installed Samsung SSD Magician and just let that tweak the relevant settings etc, also using the latest firmware. C:\ partition was created when installing Windows, the D:\ partition was created from Disk Manager.

I have been reading and apparently I should check my partitions are ok.

Firstly I tried AS SSD Benchmark which seems to be Ok:

C:\

D:\

And then I tried DiskPart from command prompt:

I was looking at the 30Gb offset and am thinking this could be a problem, or is it ok? Is AS SSD a reliable way of knowing?

Appreciate your input thanks

moogle · 22 Jun 2012 at 20:53

It should be fine if the offset is divisable by 1024, which diskpart doesn't really give you much info but if it says 30GB which is exactly 30GB then it should be okay.

toon_mad · 22 Jun 2012 at 20:59

moogle said:
It should be fine if the offset is divisable by 1024, which diskpart doesn't really give you much info but if it says 30GB which is exactly 30GB then it should be okay.

Good stuff

Wasn't sure how reliable that AS SSD tool was though each drive reports OK :cool:

moogle · 22 Jun 2012 at 21:03

Yeah seeing as the two different partition tests are close in results it looks fine, the C:\ partition is aligned right and should be giving the right speeds but since D:\ is also giving the same sort of speeds it doesn't look misaligned.

toon_mad · 22 Jun 2012 at 21:33

moogle said:
Yeah seeing as the two different partition tests are close in results it looks fine, the C:\ partition is aligned right and should be giving the right speeds but since D:\ is also giving the same sort of speeds it doesn't look misaligned.

Just wanted to double check.

Thanks

melmac · 22 Jun 2012 at 21:59

to check if your drive is aligned properly just type msinfo32 into the run box. Then in the window that opens up go to Components===>Storage===>disks.

There it will list the disks you have on the right hand side with a lot of info on each disk. For each each disk look for "Partition Starting Offset" and see what the value is. If you can divide that number by 4096 then your SSD is aligned properly.