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Best Offset for XP?

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

Hi,

Just a very quick question.

I have an Intel X25-V coming today that will be used with XP Pro.

I have read that for SSD drives you need to change the offset as XP sets it to an outdated 63kb which causes severe fragmentation of the drive.

But there is conflicting info all around as to what is best to set the offset to.

It seems it is either a choice betweem 64k, 512k, or 1024k.

Windows 7 sets it at 1024k, but I am seeing discussions for OCZ SSD's saying use 64k or 512k for XP.

As its an Intel drive I have I wanted it from Intel what would be best for XP with this intel drive. So which should I set the offset as?

Thanks.

5 REPLIES 5

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

I use 64 even for win 7 and I have the X25-E 64GB

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

I'd use the Windows 7 offset of 1 MB (1024 KB). That's the new standard for Windows. While a smaller alignment might still produce the same benefits for a given drive, I don't see how 1 MB could be worse, since it is aligned with all possible smaller choices (which would have to be powers of 2).

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

True, I tried both 1024 and 64 and saw no difference at least running the: winsat disk

I need to run more benchmarks to be sure though.

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

Actually in my experience there was no significant difference in performance between properly aligned (e.g. 1024 offset) and misaligned (63) on my X25-M G2 160GB. Benchmarks show only around 2-3% increase. So, why bother?