Partition Alignment tool

[DevonB]

The 'problem' is several OS's, (not Vista, Windows 7, Windows 2008 or Windows 2008R2 for Windows, as MS 'fixed' the problem with the drive alignment) start the partition at 63 sectors, or 31.5k bytes. Vista/W7, etc are at 1,048,576, which is divisible by 4096, which doens't have the problem. This problem is really a problem in RAID5 where all writes are 4 IOPS (write the data block, read the stripe, calculate the parity, and write the CRC) and a misalignment of the blocks by 512 bytes ends up making you read in more data than necessary every single time. The results add up in a large data environment on SAN storage arrays.

On XP/2000, the fix is easy. When you first partition a drive, from the command prompt you do -

diskpart
list disk (find the disk)
select disk (number)
create partition primary align=64

and you're done. You CANNOT do this after the fact. If you need to re-align, you're literally re-writing the WHOLE drive again as one massive copy. I've done this 'fix' literally hundreds of times over the years. This is a problem that's been known for at least a decade when larger SAN's started to become more 'popular' in the Windows environment.

I'd have to read what Paragon is saying as to why it's doing anything at all for W7. Curious now, but don't have the time.

Devon

[metamorphosis]

You CANNOT do this after the fact. If you need to re-align, you're literally re-writing the WHOLE drive again as one massive copy.

I've tried the tool - it works well, and would recommend it, with the caveat that you have all your data backed securely and your system partition ghosted (and would recommend this for any partitioning work anyway...).

DevonB, you can do obviously this after the fact, and that is exactly what this tool does (including the copying- which is absolutely no different from when you 'slide' or resize partitions in a partitioning app).

The reason for usage in Win7/Vista etc is for partitions not created by Win7, but by previous OS's or partitioning apps.

As to whether or not it makes a difference in performance, I can't tell. I'd have to do a before and after with some benchmarks, and haven't done so.

Get in before it goes non-free people Particularly you system techs out there.
M@

[aMUSEd]

You CANNOT do this after the fact. If you need to re-align, you're literally re-writing the WHOLE drive again as one massive copy.

I've tried the tool - it works well, and would recommend it, with the caveat that you have all your data backed securely and your system partition ghosted (and would recommend this for any partitioning work anyway...).

Seriously it's worked wonders on my system. It boots up perfectly every time now and in half the time. Before I'd sometimes have to try several times.

[DevonB]

DevonB, you can do obviously this after the fact, and that is exactly what this tool does (including the copying- which is absolutely no different from when you 'slide' or resize partitions in a partitioning app).

You didn't catch how I said it. I gave the procedure to do it with diskpart. Once you do it with diskpart you CANNOT do it after the fact. You can only clean the partition off and start over, period. With other tools, sure, you can do it, but not with diskpart.

In short, if you get the disk from scratch, you can do the exact same thing yourself without issue, without a special tool, and without any risk to your data (because there is no data on the drive).

Get the tool? Who cares. I'm not doing RAID 5, where the REAL impact is there, and I certainly never run a load high enough to generate thousands of I/O writes in a small random fashion to really make the difference. So in that repsect, it's not worth the time nor the risk to my data, even with a backup. It's a 'geek tweek' that does affect enterprise storage and large installations. I am well aware of this for work at my day job and have done the tweak to several hundred servers over the last 5 years. For a desktop? Whatever....

Devon[/code]

[DevonB]

Seriously it's worked wonders on my system. It boots up perfectly every time now and in half the time. Before I'd sometimes have to try several times.

I would suspect a faulty drive, and you just re-wrote all the data which corrected the problem. That's not a miracle, you had a physical problem. I wouldn't sing the praises of the tool in a situation like that. You probably had a bad block of data that it had a problem reading that the BBR process probably finally failed out when you did the full copy. Your machine should have booted 100% of the time on its own, but that's kind of a duh.

Devon

[metamorphosis]

I would suspect a faulty drive, and you just re-wrote all the data which corrected the problem. That's not a miracle, you had a physical problem. I wouldn't sing the praises of the tool in a situation like that. Your machine should have booted 100% of the time on its own, but that's kind of a duh.

If a complete re-writing of data fixed a faulty drive, then yes,
that would be a miracle, so that's not the case.

[DevonB]

I would suspect a faulty drive, and you just re-wrote all the data which corrected the problem. That's not a miracle, you had a physical problem. I wouldn't sing the praises of the tool in a situation like that. Your machine should have booted 100% of the time on its own, but that's kind of a duh.

If a complete re-writing of data fixed a faulty drive, then yes,
that would be a miracle, so that's not the case.

Oh good, you've dealt with thousands of drive failures, know how a drive fails consistently, can talk about the BBR process, and are an expert in the field? Please, enlighten us then.

Devon

[metamorphosis]

Ignore the idiot...
caution: this tool may have problems with FAT32 partitions.
several drive folders on a FAT32 partition turned into 32kb files and found.000 CHK files on using it. Another FAT32 partition wouldn't realign. The NTFS partitions were fine.
Cheers,
m@

[whyterabbyt]

Ignore the idiot...

Good advice. To proceed, click 'mute me' below the name metamorphosis.

[metamorphosis]

...oh bugger off dude!

[DevonB]

Ignore the idiot...

Ah, so that's a 'no, I don't know.' No problem. You don't have to proclaim that that's not it if you can't explain why it's not it. I could have been less 'snarky' about it, so I appologize, but back to the important bits -

For aMUSEd -

Your system booted sometimes, and not other times. We're dealing with 1's and 0's. It either works or it doesn't, until something starts to become faulty; memory module begins to fail, sectors on a drive start to have problems (the whole reason the drive has a good amount of space set aside to re-allocate bad sectors, also called BBR or Bad Block Replacement), video card having issues, etc.

(As we start, keep in mind drives SHIP FROM THE FACTORY with bad blocks. This is normal. This is why each drive sets aside a certain amount of storage that you, the user cannot access, as a landing area for its spared-out blocks. Also, drives usually have in their firmware the ability to try to correct bad data and re-allocate them.) To continue, you went ahead and literally rewrote every bit of the drive with that tool to another location on the drive. Since we knew sometimes it worked, it was certainly possible the tool was able to read everything ok during its move. When the tool went to write, it's possible the drive now recognized it had a bad block on the drive, and 'spared' it out with a new block, and healed itself.

As for the boot speed issue, that's simple as well to explain. As you accumulate bad blocks, the drive will re-try to read the blocks, which takes time. One system I worked on recently, which had a drive going bad, would freeze for a bit, but when you checked the System logs, I saw all the disk errors. Some days, it ran fine, others it would freeze up for a bit. The one I was working on, you'd actually hear the drive acuator motor hard and work trying to recover when the problem was occuring. But not all drives fail the same way either.

So, question would be do you see anything in your logs? That would be a clue, but wouldn't be definitive though. If the hardware itself corrected the problem before the OS got involved, you very well might not see anything in the logs either. The OS does have timeout values before it starts to get involved, and lets the hardware do its thing first. You'd have to go in with a drive diagnostic tool to check the drive to see, and the tools available to the public might not give you that information either.

If I were you, I'd grab whatever drive maker's diag tool and run a check on the drive. Nothing in your system is more important than the data drive, period. Everything else is easily replacable, relatively speaking.

Devon

[aMUSEd]

Ignore the idiot...

Ah, so that's a 'no, I don't know.' No problem. You don't have to proclaim that that's not it if you can't explain why it's not it. I could have been less 'snarky' about it, so I appologize, but back to the important bits -

For aMUSEd -

Your system booted sometimes, and not other times. We're dealing with 1's and 0's. It either works or it doesn't, until something starts to become faulty; memory module begins to fail, sectors on a drive start to have problems (the whole reason the drive has a good amount of space set aside to re-allocate bad sectors, also called BBR or Bad Block Replacement), video card having issues, etc.

(As we start, keep in mind drives SHIP FROM THE FACTORY with bad blocks. This is normal. This is why each drive sets aside a certain amount of storage that you, the user cannot access, as a landing area for its spared-out blocks. Also, drives usually have in their firmware the ability to try to correct bad data and re-allocate them.) To continue, you went ahead and literally rewrote every bit of the drive with that tool to another location on the drive. Since we knew sometimes it worked, it was certainly possible the tool was able to read everything ok during its move. When the tool went to write, it's possible the drive now recognized it had a bad block on the drive, and 'spared' it out with a new block, and healed itself.

As for the boot speed issue, that's simple as well to explain. As you accumulate bad blocks, the drive will re-try to read the blocks, which takes time. One system I worked on recently, which had a drive going bad, would freeze for a bit, but when you checked the System logs, I saw all the disk errors. Some days, it ran fine, others it would freeze up for a bit. The one I was working on, you'd actually hear the drive acuator motor hard and work trying to recover when the problem was occuring. But not all drives fail the same way either.

So, question would be do you see anything in your logs? That would be a clue, but wouldn't be definitive though. If the hardware itself corrected the problem before the OS got involved, you very well might not see anything in the logs either. The OS does have timeout values before it starts to get involved, and lets the hardware do its thing first. You'd have to go in with a drive diagnostic tool to check the drive to see, and the tools available to the public might not give you that information either.

If I were you, I'd grab whatever drive maker's diag tool and run a check on the drive. Nothing in your system is more important than the data drive, period. Everything else is easily replacable, relatively speaking.

Devon

Thanks - I ran hardware diagnostics but there are no problems with the drive. I had recently added another partition and that seemed to cause some problems as before that I wasn't getting any. When I was moving round partitions in partition magic it did warn about partitions possibly having problems booting up when positioned in certain ways - something about cylinders (didn't really understand it). But then I deleted the extra partition as it was only to test my dpc problems anyway but the problems persisted until I ran the realignment tool.

[DevonB]

When I was moving round partitions in partition magic it did warn about partitions possibly having problems booting up when positioned in certain ways - something about cylinders (didn't really understand it). But then I deleted the extra partition as it was only to test my dpc problems anyway but the problems persisted until I ran the realignment tool.

If you screw up a partition, you WILL know it, because it's gone. Still sounds like bad blocks to me. The alignment tool only really benefits in heavy random write situations. Doing a boot is not heavy write, it's heavy read. If it's 50% faster, then you fixed an underlying problem with the re-write of the data.

Devon

[DevonB]

Ah, read it a bit closer now -

In this document describe all major issues regarding partitions misalignment on 4K hard disk drives, solid state drives, RAID, SAN and in virtual environments. Also in the article is considered the reasons why partitions become misaligned and the consequential disadvantages.

Aside from the new 4k physical alignment drives that are brand new to the market, this is squarely aimed at the environemnt I work in as a SAN storage administrator for Windows 2003 servers running in a VMWare enviornment on RAID 5 drives on a SAN storage controller. While this will work on your desktop, this is not the aim of the product. NetApp and EMC also have a similar white paper for SAN storage and the alignment problem. Again, not applicable to desktops.

Devon

[metamorphosis]

Ignore the idiot...

Ah, so that's a 'no, I don't know.'

You're free to take part in a dick-swinging competition, but I'm also free to decline, good buddy. That's what was meant
Cheers