07-01-2011 01:16 AM
07-01-2011 07:44 AM
The benchmark tool in question reports things in a very stupid way. "31K - BAD" doesn't mean you have bad LBAs on your flash drive -- it means the partition it's using for file I/O (benchmarking) is not aligned to a proper boundary, thus your performance will be greatly decreased. "31K" is the offset, "BAD" means "non-optimal". This impacts file I/O performance, not just benchmarking-related tests -- meaning, your drive could be operating much better if the partition were aligned properly.
You'll need to recreate the partition with proper alignment, or possibly "move" it. There are tools for both. I believe a common one people use is the (commercial) Paragon Alignment Tool.
07-02-2011 02:12 AM
Is there anything besides the paragon alignment tool that can fix this problem? 25 dollars to fix a single problem that i will probably never encounter again is not worth it. Are there any free tools that can do this?
thanks
07-03-2011 08:46 AM
Probably, but I know of none that are "simple to use" and will actually resize your partitions without impacting your data (possibly GPart, but I've had that thing crash on NTFS resizing resulting in 100% filesystem loss). Also the question of data integrity comes into play; what if one of the tools (commercial or free) causes your filesystem to disappear or break? Oops, there goes all of your data.
With that in mind, you could simply recreate the partition, properly aligned, and the issue is solved. This also means backing up all of your data/reformatting, which you should be doing anyway.
Proper partition alignment (during creation) can be achieved using either diskpar.exe or diskpart.exe. They're completely different utilities. The OCZ forum has a http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?48309-Partition-alignment-importance-under-Wi.... decent post explaining how to do it with diskpar.exe.