Call me stupid, but what means to align partitions? (A short explanation should have been provided in the program's description.)

Mike  –  14 years ago  –  Βρήκατε αυτό το σχόλιο χρήσιμο? ναι | όχι (+217)

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Paragon Alignment Tool - Background / Explanation

Physical disks are laid out in tracks. Apparently SSDs (Solid State Disks) also emulate this layout/structure. Usually partitioning tools start at the first available track on the disk and go from there mapping out blocks to the tracks. Often blocks will overlay boundaries between tracks due to their alignment (where in the first track the blocks began from) which means multiple operations will be needed to read (or write) that single block (as it spans multiple tracks). We can eliminate the overhead by ensuring that blocks sit entirely within tracks and do not span across track boundaries. Not only does this improve speed - but can extend the lifespan of SSD drives.

Partition alignment importance under Windows XP (32-bit and 64-bit)..why it helps with stuttering and increases drive working life. http://bit.ly/aZkE8m

(I'll probably come back and improve this explanation once I think of an easier way to explain it)

The before & after flash animation graphic at http://www.paragon-software.com/business/partition-alignment/index.html gives a visual explanation as to why efficiencies can be made by aligning partitions in some situations (RAID, SAN, Virtual Disks, 4K hard disks). Other people don't have anything much to gain (apparently).

BuBBy  –  14 years ago  –  Βρήκατε αυτό το σχόλιο χρήσιμο? ναι | όχι (+135)

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According to the website, Partition Aligning feature is available across all Paragon's Flagship products which means, if you are a GAOTD regular and has downloaded Paragon's previous give aways, there is a high chance that you might already be having the ability to re-align the partitions! May be you can check the installed Paragon software for the feature before downloading. Just my 2 cents!

Wire FX  –  14 years ago  –  Βρήκατε αυτό το σχόλιο χρήσιμο? ναι | όχι (+108)

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Again another good tool, but with one or two points.

If your running more than one disk that is in a RAID array hardware-based redundant array of independent disks (RAID) or a software-based RAID, then yes this CAN be beneficial to you, because it takes out the work of YOU using diskpart.exe and its dos based commands to get the same result.

If however you’re a normal Home user with a single or several single disks then why would you want to use it, because it won’t help you at all, reason: one disk cannot be out of alignment with its self.

So the short of it all.

If your running windows server 2003 XP in a raid format, and you don’t have one of the following installed:

Partition Manager Professional
Partition Manager Server
Partition Manager for Virtual Server
Hard Disk Manager Professional
Hard Disk Manager Workstation
Hard Disk Manager Server
Hard Disk Manager for Virtual Server

Then it could be useful to you, I myself prefer the Dos diskpart.exe method as it’s the one designed to do it, where as these are designed on top of the Dos command structure.

Astraa  –  14 years ago  –  Βρήκατε αυτό το σχόλιο χρήσιμο? ναι | όχι (+98)

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Everybody will be well advised to steer clear of this one. I just tried to align my C drive and it completely ruined my notebook. I had a dual boot xubuntu/win XP each on it's own partition. I stated this soft and it advised me I will have to reboot the machine to give it exclusive access to my C drive (the windrive) which I marked for realignment. I agreed, it started to run and it did something, I do not know what, but after restarting I am missing the grub bootloader and I can start neither Xubuntu nor XP. Fortunately I have another Xubuntu installed on an external harddisk from which I am writing right now. Will spend the rest of the day trying to resurrect my notebook. Bugger paragon for this.

einstein  –  14 years ago  –  Βρήκατε αυτό το σχόλιο χρήσιμο? ναι | όχι (+81)

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