Partition Alignment neccessary?

[idata]

Hi,

I have an Intel 320 running an Windows XP and Ubuntu system in Dual-Boot with GRUB.

The first partitition starts at sector 63 ( one sectors has 512bytes) or 32256 bytes.

This is a fresh clone from a HDD and performance measurements are satifactory after

a few days of moderate usage. There are also no hangs or freezes until now.

Therefore my question:

Is a partition alignment to 4096 byte boundaries strictly neccesary or does the

SSD-controller inside the 320-models already cope with any partition offset/boundaries

without causing any extra wear and tear?

Regards,

Lophiomys

[idata]

4 days, 170 views, no answers?

Hello Intel experts! Do you have an opinon about this matter?

I could send you an offer to investigate this for you, since this is not a free Open Source Project here... 😐

[idata]

Reportedly SSD has to work upto 3 times more if partitions are misaligned, so it's always recommended to align them. I haven't been able to find any benchmarks though.Perhaps you can do us a favour and post hard numbers by doing a benchmark before and after.

(If you're going to do so, please secure erase and do a fresh install of windows 7. From what I hear, using gparted and such to move the partitions around doesn't actually help at all)

[idata]

Hi Goose,

I am out here to get a answer from a qualified Intel expert, who knows by heart

how the controller inside the 320 series works. That should not be hard thing to state,

and would be appropriate in this Intel forum.

I am very disappointed about the silence from the side of expert Intel staff, and that

even in the FAQs nothing is clarified about the pro and cons of partition alignment.

[idata]

From what I have been told (coming from an Intel engineer), the controller handles the partition misalignment.

HOWEVER, I have seen benchmarks where there is noticable performance gain from alignment.

That being said, you can still realign the SSD even after an OS is installed. It just takes a few extra steps... just Google "aligning SSD". Just remember, always back up your data before disk migrations.