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]

Thanks, I have already studied all I could find about partition alignment on the internet.

A lot of information there is either inconsistent or wrong, or simply superseeded by new technologie.

So, just to avoid a misunderstanding,

you are saying that there is no extra wear on the live span of memory cells,

if you do not partition-align an Intel 320 SSD, because the controller internally cares for proper aligment

to memory cell boundaries?

Where does the performance gain come from after the partition alignment, if the controller handles the aligment internally already?

Could you post links to the benchmarks, that you have seen? (its the internet after all)

Thanks.

[idata]

More than 1200 hits, 3 weeks gone and

still no definite and unambigous answer to the questions in the original post.

?

[idata]

Benchmarks and Discussion right here: /thread/20042 http://communities.intel.com/thread/20042

[idata]

Yup.

In your first answer you say that "the controller handles the partition misalignment".

So external alignment should not be necessary?

As opposed in the thread, you are linking to, there is a clear advice to do manual

partition alignment. Whereby I see that the published benchmarks there, do not

show any significant improvement in speed, except for the 4k writes.(delta is 10MB/s)

Additionally this in contradiction to the timings I did on my own Intel 320 before and after alignment.

On my system the 4k-measurements did not change, but the sequential wirte values improved by

about 10MB/s after deleting some GB of data and performing partition alignment.

(As a reminder: I never had a speed problem.)

The intitial question remains open:

If the partitions are not aligned on an Intel 320, does it cause extra internal wear and tear in the long term?