Do I need to align my partition for X25-M SSD?

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Galvin

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I just got the 160GB X25-M from new egg should have it by next thursday.

Right now I have a boot partition 100GB and another partition for files on my WD 640GB.
I plan on using acronis drive image to copy the boot partition to the SSD and use that for my system drive.

But I don't think the partition is not aligned. I created the partiton with acronis disk director. Then installed windows vista on it.

Just want to make sure I do this right. Also should I set it for IDE mode or something else?
I heard IDE mode is not always best.

Thanks
 
Align the partion then do your image.

AFAIK, you can't restore that image and expect it to be aligned unless the image was aligned.

You can't expect a bad image to become good.;)

Also should I set it for IDE mode or something else?
Click to expand...

Any drive that accepts a SATA cable should be run in SATA mode. Depending upon your MB and OS, you could be in for a little or alot, to move from IDE to SATA.
 
I aligned my 80GB Intel before installing Windows XP on it. I have no idea if it was necessary though.

I don't think you can use Acronis and keep an aligned partition. It will overwrite the partition.
 
Well I already use sata but its run in IDE mode. I don't think the partition was ever aligned anyway since the OS never created it.
 
It's my understanding that if you delete the factory partition, when you create a new one during the vista installation it will automatically align the partition. I suggest using achi mode as long as it doesn't cause any problems. If it does cause problems, then IDE should work fine.
 
Well I already use sata but its run in IDE mode.
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You can do this but it may limit your transfer rates to SATA1 specs (1.5 Gbit/s).

Vista and IE7 seem to be closer to the preferred alignment than XP.

I would suggest you read the MB manual and determine what's needed for a AHCI/SATA install on your specific ports.

Sounds to me like you should do a complete reinstall. ;)
 
Well its how I been doing it for 3+ years now at least. Always use compatability mode in the bios so rescue tools and stuff can see the harddrive without booting into windows.
When it goes into windows its running sata though. From what I been told, install sata drives and they boot up as IDE then windows takes over for sata.

If acronis rescue CD can see the harddisks using pure sata mode or what not i'll try it.
 
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Well, I just formatted my fresh X25-M during Win 7 installation. Did I need to do anything else?
 
Nope, Windows 7 aligns it perfectly. Just disable defragmentation (and maybe pagefile since you have 4GB) and you'll be good to go!
 
I've been working on a review article for Acronis True Image Home 2009, and while working with it I discovered that even if you did a backup of an aligned partition...the restoration would NOT restore the partition back to the same exact (aligned) location. It would ALWAYS restore the partition to sector 63 (default for XP I believe).

This tool was intended for Vista, yet they can't even get the default alignment right.

I don't think I would ever call that a "True Image" of a partition.

This cannot be fixed as far as I know. I've been looking for tools that would align a partition post restore, and I have not yet found one. There are no command line parameters, no advanced options, nothing, that can be configured with ATI to force it to restore the partition to a different boundary.

So during the next few articles I'm working on, I'm checking to see if any of the backup/restore tools actually restore the partitions back to the original spot as they should.

There are a few other problems with the latest versions of ATI, such as buggy USB drive support and the utter failure that Acronis's file backup utility is (cannot successfully backup files under certain conditions). I have Acronis True Image v9, and if I were to ever upgrade from that I would probably not upgrade to Home 2009.
 
SSD's are different than HD's
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Which has little to do with the page file being enabled.
and one can if you have plenty of memory
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Well, first of all, we know nothing about the OP's intended use of the system. Secondly, having "plenty" of memory doesn't guarantee that the system will still run reliably without a page file. Do you see how this is a problem?
 
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Well he atleast has to move the pagefile off the ssd. I would just dissable it as I have never noticed any difference in windows vista with or without page. It takes up expensive space on the ssd and increases writing and wear on the drive. Atleast make it small and move it to magnetic media.

Btw when you dissable the page file the only negative effect is you will have less memory for processes as windows wont be able to assign processes virtual memory space that is unused to the page file while not actually writing anything to it. So it is okay to dissable your page file on a system with alot of ram but you will not use your ram as effeciently as with a page file enabled. Just get more ram and optomize for the ssd!
 
Has anyone actually demonstrated the existence of a page file harming a decent (Intel, Vertex) SSD?
 
And thus the 1st axiom of [H] is fulfilled: Every thread eventually turns into an argument about page files.
 
I've run the tests numerous times. IDE mode and AHCI mode have virtually identical performance. The main reason to use AHCI (SSD's might be different, I can't say for sure as I don't have any) is that AHCI mode allows for hot swapping.
 
Dan_D said:
I've run the tests numerous times. IDE mode and AHCI mode have virtually identical performance. The main reason to use AHCI (SSD's might be different, I can't say for sure as I don't have any) is that AHCI mode allows for hot swapping.
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and TRIM.
 
I've run the tests numerous times. IDE mode and AHCI mode have virtually identical performance.
Click to expand...

I've had varying experiences depending upon the chipset/HD combination. Some would improve, some wouldn't.

I thought it may be just the way I was "holding my mouth" in different circumstances but this article put it into respective.

His testing is far more accurate then my seat of the pants testing but it pretty much reflects my experiences.

Since I've moved to Vista and the drivers are included, there's little sense in not enabling AHCI.
 
Old Hippie said:
I've had varying experiences depending upon the chipset/HD combination. Some would improve, some wouldn't.

I thought it may be just the way I was "holding my mouth" in different circumstances but this article put it into respective.

His testing is far more accurate then my seat of the pants testing but it pretty much reflects my experiences.

Since I've moved to Vista and the drivers are included, there's little sense in not enabling AHCI.
Click to expand...

I agree. There is really no reason not to enable it. I enable it on my own systems and the boards I test. Still, I rarely see much if any different between boards or even chipsets. The differences I usually see are the same difference I see from chipset to chipset comparing say an SB600 to an ICH9R. But when comparing like chipsets, I rarely see much of a difference either way.

Granted all my tests are with IO Meter because that's what we use. I might see more pronounced differences in other HDD benchmarking applications.
 
brandinb said:
ahci is required for ncq i believe. So it may be better for multitasking.
Click to expand...

This is true also, but in the real world I've seen very little difference between systems running their SATA drives in IDE mode vs. AHCI. In a server type setting, yes, the difference could be much larger.
 
We have done some in-house testing on this recently and it is useless on these newer SSDs.
 
I'm still confused over several SSD tweaks that are often mentioned and the value of some is apparently always in contention... This Win7 FAQ straight from a MS dev further confused me. Look at his comments regarding the page file, he actually states that the page file is one of the better suited things to run on the SSD.

I would never disable it myself, Windows always seems to use it even when you have tons of RAM, so there must be a good reason to keep it... But I would've thought that keeping it on a 2dary HDD would make sense, even w/an SSD, as the OS/programs could be accessed w/o interfering w/access to the page file. That's something I've done even with regular HDDs, I'll probably still do it when I upgrade to a SSD since Win7 won't disable the page file by default w/SSDs and I don't intend to.

The FAQ also says that Win7 will disable Superfetch by default on SSDs, which I still don't understand... Isn't Superfetch just supposed to scan the drive during idle period for stuff that it can cache to RAM? It's not writing/wearing down the drive, and it shouldn't interfere w/normal operations, accessing programs from RAM rather than the SSD should still be significantly faster no? Or is the difference in speed so negligible to the user that avoiding potential conflicts w/SF's operation during non-idle periods supersedes the performance benefits?

The only tweak that seem to be universally agreed upon is that defragging isn't necessary for SSDs, but that's fairly obvious, seems it's the only thing Win7 configures by default when it recognizes an SSD besides disabling Superfetch and other boot/cache-related services. Also, according to Anand none of the current SSDs support TRIM under Win7 w/the current firmware releases... But several of 'em are working towards supporting it by the time Win7 is officially out.
 
I just got my very own Intel X25-M 80GB SSD and I'm still left wondering if I need to specifically align my partition before I use this drive or not?

Has anyone done any empirical testing on this specific SSD to see if there is any difference between aligned and non-aligned partition performance?

I'm planning on reinstalling Windows XP SP3 for now until Windows 7 comes out in a few months and I make the switch then (skipping Vista).

I can do the alignment since it won't hurt and the procedure is very easy to push the first partition from the 63 to 64 sector boundary to get it on a nice n/4 location but is this necessary with the Intel drives? Is there a performance difference? Do I have to use my SSD as a guinea pig and to my own testing?
 
Format the drive during vista/win7 install and it will set 2048 first sector boundry which is perfectly aligned. Then pop out the disk and start xp install and use the partition you created.

And yes you will get better performance when aligned especially on small writes.
 
I can do the alignment since it won't hurt and the procedure is very easy to push the first partition from the 63 to 64 sector boundary to get it on a nice n/4 location but is this necessary with the Intel drives?
Click to expand...

You have the opportunity to do the recommened install with no problem.

Am I missing something or is this pretty much a no-brainer? :D
 
night_2004 said:
I've been working on a review article for Acronis True Image Home 2009, and while working with it I discovered that even if you did a backup of an aligned partition...the restoration would NOT restore the partition back to the same exact (aligned) location. It would ALWAYS restore the partition to sector 63 (default for XP I believe).

This tool was intended for Vista, yet they can't even get the default alignment right.

I don't think I would ever call that a "True Image" of a partition.

This cannot be fixed as far as I know. I've been looking for tools that would align a partition post restore, and I have not yet found one. There are no command line parameters, no advanced options, nothing, that can be configured with ATI to force it to restore the partition to a different boundary.

So during the next few articles I'm working on, I'm checking to see if any of the backup/restore tools actually restore the partitions back to the original spot as they should.

There are a few other problems with the latest versions of ATI, such as buggy USB drive support and the utter failure that Acronis's file backup utility is (cannot successfully backup files under certain conditions). I have Acronis True Image v9, and if I were to ever upgrade from that I would probably not upgrade to Home 2009.
Click to expand...

use a linux boot cd & dd. This will restore the partition to where it was before, assuming you do a dd of the entire device and not of an individual partition.

(assuming sda is your local source drive & sdb is your local destination drive)
local clone, device to device
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=16k

(assuming sda is your local source drive and you want to store the image file at /mnt/tmp/backup.dd)
local clone, device to "backup file"
dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/tmp/backup.dd bs=16k

(assuming sda is your source drive, and sdb on remote box is your destination drive, login=remote login)
dd if=/dev/sda ibs=16k obs=2k | ssh -c arcfour -o "Compression no" login@box "dd of=/dev/sdb obs=16k"
 
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Is there any way to align without doing a full reinstall?
My existing setup is dual boot XP sp3/ Ubuntu and I'm mighty tempted to just clone it onto the SSD.
 
Ruiner said:
Is there any way to align without doing a full reinstall?
My existing setup is dual boot XP sp3/ Ubuntu and I'm mighty tempted to just clone it onto the SSD.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure about the dual boot part, but at least for a single OS partition the answer is yes. You have to create an empty aligned partition on the new drive, and then use a drive imaging utility to clone the old partition over. The trick is to use program that can image into an existing partition without overwriting the alignment. I used DriveImage XML, and Drive SnapShot is supposed to work also. You then may have to mess around a bit to restore the MBR and make the new drive boot properly. On Vista/Win7 partitions you also have to tinker with something called the BCD, which DriveImage will do for you.
 
Partition Alignment Offset = 1 MB (2048 sectors or 256 pages)

The partition alignment offset amount is also being debated now by folks from the OCZ Forums who seem to be the forerunners in SSD testing and tweaking. In their Guide for SDD Setup they previously recommended 64KB (128 sectors) and 128KB (256 sectors) alignment offsets but the recommendations are now changing to align the SSDs to the 1MB offset (2048 sectors or 256 pages) to match Microsoft Windows Vista and 7 alignment offset.

The reasoning for this larger offset are erase block sizes on the SSDs which are made up of multiple 4KB pages. These erase blocks vary by SSD but in the case of Intel they are 512 KB in size (1028 sectors or 128 pages). So setting a 1MB offset (2048 sectors or 256 pages) you get even to fit two erase blocks evenly so that your partition is aligned on these erase blocks and the 4KB page sizes at the same time.

Now other manufacturers might use erase blocks of 32KB, 64KB, 128KB, 256KB, or 512KB and all of these block sizes all fit evenly into a 1MB offset so that all of these erase blocks will be properly aligned including being aligned on the pages also. This even division into 1MB seems to be the reason why Microsoft foresaw the need to align partitions by default and why they chose the 1MB offset by default.



AnandTech.com - Intel X25-M SSD: Intel Delivers One of the World's Fastest Drives - The Flash Hierarchy & Data Loss

We've already established that a flash cell can either store one or two bits depending on whether it's a SLC or MLC device. Group a bunch of cells together and you've got a page. A page is the smallest structure you can program (write to) in a NAND flash device. In the case of most MLC NAND flash each page is 4KB. A block consists of a number of pages, in the Intel MLC SSD a block is 128 pages (128 pages x 4KB per page = 512KB per block = 0.5MB). A block is the smallest structure you can erase. So when you write to a SSD you can write 4KB at a time, but when you erase from a SSD you have to erase 512KB at a time. I'll explore that a bit further in a moment, but let's look at what happens when you erase data from a SSD.
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Acronis DiskManager v10 = Does Not Respect Aligned Partitions

I can say that Acronis DiskManager v10 does not allow imaging onto a created and aligned partition. I tried that and it doesn't work, even if you try to massage the new partition to start at roughly the same location ahead of the start of the drive, the end result ends up being improperly aligned by having a different offset than you set.
 
The trick is to use program that can image into an existing partition without overwriting the alignment. I used DriveImage XML, and Drive SnapShot is supposed to work also.
Click to expand...

First time I've heard those 2 programs will work. Do you have a link for that info?

Bummer, Drive SnapShot doesn't do Vista.
 
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Old Hippie said:
First time I've heard those 2 programs will work. Do you have a link for that info?

Bummer, Drive SnapShot doesn't do Vista.
Click to expand...

EDIT: I think I got the information from this thread. Also, after using DriveImage, I used diskpart to confirm that the alignment didn't change.

I had no problem running DriveImage on Vista x64 and Windows 7 x64. They also have a BartPE module for it, so you can create a BartPE boot CD and run it from there if your OS is not supported (assuming you have a WinXP install disk laying around).

EDIT: One detail I forgot to mention: If I remember correctly, DriveImage does not let you copy a larger partition to a smaller partition, even if the actual data on the larger partition is small enough to fit. I was trying to go from a 300MB drive to an X25-M 80GB, and I had to use Acronis Disk Director to shrink the C: partition down to 70GB or so and let DriveImage grow that into the 80GB target partition.
 
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I think I got the information from this thread. Also, after using DriveImage, I used diskpart to confirm that the alignment didn't change.
Click to expand...

Nice, Thanks for the info!
 
Metaluna said:
I'm not sure about the dual boot part, but at least for a single OS partition the answer is yes. You have to create an empty aligned partition on the new drive, and then use a drive imaging utility to clone the old partition over. The trick is to use program that can image into an existing partition without overwriting the alignment. I used DriveImage XML, and Drive SnapShot is supposed to work also. You then may have to mess around a bit to restore the MBR and make the new drive boot properly. On Vista/Win7 partitions you also have to tinker with something called the BCD, which DriveImage will do for you.
Click to expand...


I have a new board coming soon so I took the lazy way out and just cloned my entire old drive with Acronis. I'll do a fresh align/install with AHCI for XP and then throw Ubuntu back on.

btw, I put the swap files for both OS's on my Raptor (the linux swap in it's own partition). Was this a 'good thing'?
 
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I just got a chance to build my new Core i7 based system and decided to install Microsoft Windows 7 Release Candidate 64-bit (Build 7100) as my new OS, this way I skip Vista and go directly there from XP.

I did a completely new install on this SSD and I let Windows 7 RC choose the partition sizes it wanted. I ended up with a 100 MB (System Reserved) partition that is aligned at the 1 MB (2048 sector) location, and then my real 76 GB (System) partition with my operating system files.

I'm not too thrilled about the need for the 100 MB useless partition but at least it is properly aligned. My real partition is also aligned since it starts on offset 105906176 (206848 sectors) that is cleanly divisible by 4 KB (4096) pages and 512 KB erase blocks. So that is good also meaning that the OS aligns partitions correctly.

Microsoft Windows 7 Release Candidate 64-bit (Build 7100) = Correctly Aligns Partitions on 4 KB pages and 512 KB erase blocks.

Code: 
[B]diskpar -i 0[/B]

---- Drive 0 Geometry Infomation ----
Cylinders = 9729
TracksPerCylinder = 255
SectorsPerTrack = 63
BytesPerSector = 512
DiskSize = 80023749120 (Bytes) = 76316 (MB)

---- Drive Partition 0 Infomation ----
[U]StatringOffset = 1048576[/U]
PartitionLength = 104857600
[U]HiddenSectors = 2048[/U]
PartitionNumber = 1
PartitionType = 7
---- Drive Partition 1 Infomation ----
[U]StatringOffset = 105906176[/U]
PartitionLength = 79919316992
[U]HiddenSectors = 206848[/U]
PartitionNumber = 2
PartitionType = 7

End of partition information. Total existing partitions: 2
 
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