SSD alignment headaches
Posted: Wed Dec 21, 2011 8:53 pm
I acquired a 120GB SSD for my laptop, as a *secondary* drive. My laptop supports two. I belatedly learned that the secondary channel is allegedly SATA I (1.5Gbps), but since I'm getting ATTO benchmark write/read results of 245 and 275MBps @ 8192, that doesn't seem to be true. Even though I installed it as a secondary drive, I had every intention of booting from it. The reason I did it is to maintain UEFI BIOS support for the mfr. diagnostics and recovery partitions, which I'm betting MUST be located on the primary disk, and possibly in specific MBR locations, in order to be accessible. I really didn't want to squander 25GB of the SSD on those partitions, so I devised an alternative: I moved the Windows system reserved partition to the SSD, then split the Windows boot partition and copied the essential half to the SSD, and finally edited the BCD store on the system reserved partition to point to it. After the move, the second half of the Windows partition, the 'data' half, was expanded to fill the entire space remaining on the original drive. I used the Windows 'Location' feature to point to the special folders on this partition, and for user Public and some other folders I created junctions or symlinks in their former locations.
All that worked fine, insofar as Windows booted as if nothing had happened. The problem is that NONE of the partitions on the SSD came out aligned! The recovery and diagnostic partitions on the platter drive remained aligned, and so was the expanded (logical) data partition. I knew I needed to correct the SSD alignments, lest it impact performance and wear; I was only getting a 6.1 WEI disk score, which seemed a bit low.
Since BIBM supposedly supports and ensures alignment, I figured simply resizing and sliding each partition would fix that. It didn't!
Next I got a copy of Paragon's alignment tool. It recognized the misalignments and offered to align them, but it only succeeded on the system reserved partition! It quietly gave up on the Windows boot and BIBM partitions, reporting the result simply as "Not Aligned" with no explanation or error. It did this regardless whether I booted from the Windows partition on the SSD or from a live CD when running the tool.
FINALLY, after countless hours of trial and error over two days, using an external eSATA GPT RAID 5 enclosure for support, and including a wasted detour with Paragon's SSD migration tool, I finally succeeded in moving a copy of the Windows partition to the SSD that came out aligned. STILL the little 7MB BIBM partition is incorrectly aligned, but hopefully that doesn't matter or affect wear or performance.
My objective here is to ask: why was this so hard? Why wasn't it 'automatic'? Shouldn't there be a Sector Align menu function for partitions, if it's going to be this unintuitive?
I'd also like to clarify whether the Image For DOS component supports sector alignment or not.
All that worked fine, insofar as Windows booted as if nothing had happened. The problem is that NONE of the partitions on the SSD came out aligned! The recovery and diagnostic partitions on the platter drive remained aligned, and so was the expanded (logical) data partition. I knew I needed to correct the SSD alignments, lest it impact performance and wear; I was only getting a 6.1 WEI disk score, which seemed a bit low.
Since BIBM supposedly supports and ensures alignment, I figured simply resizing and sliding each partition would fix that. It didn't!
Next I got a copy of Paragon's alignment tool. It recognized the misalignments and offered to align them, but it only succeeded on the system reserved partition! It quietly gave up on the Windows boot and BIBM partitions, reporting the result simply as "Not Aligned" with no explanation or error. It did this regardless whether I booted from the Windows partition on the SSD or from a live CD when running the tool.
FINALLY, after countless hours of trial and error over two days, using an external eSATA GPT RAID 5 enclosure for support, and including a wasted detour with Paragon's SSD migration tool, I finally succeeded in moving a copy of the Windows partition to the SSD that came out aligned. STILL the little 7MB BIBM partition is incorrectly aligned, but hopefully that doesn't matter or affect wear or performance.
My objective here is to ask: why was this so hard? Why wasn't it 'automatic'? Shouldn't there be a Sector Align menu function for partitions, if it's going to be this unintuitive?
I'd also like to clarify whether the Image For DOS component supports sector alignment or not.