Weird HDtune bench on Vertex 2

The numbers look about right. Download AS SSD Just open it but don't run thr test. Look in the top left hans corner, it will tell you your alignment and the AHCI driver. If the alignment is wrong it will tell you. With Vertex and most SSDs, running too many tests will degrade the performance. You should start from a cold boot and let it idle on the login page for 2 hours each week. It does its 'garbage collection' that way and will keep performance up. If it helps, here are some tests on my 90GB vertex2

You obviously have the 100MB partition. But, anything divisable by 4 is OK, and that number is.

Use diskpart
type diskpart
list disk
select disk 1(or whichever disk # is your SSD)
list partition
(if you have more than 1 select each partition - select partition 1, then select partition 2)
On each one you will get a page listing size and offset. The offset is the alignment.
I have only 1 partition. it should look similar to this. with the 100MB partition the 100MB should be 1024 the C partition is usually a weird number.

stonebear said:

Oh boy, it is formatted to 310mb and not 1024 kb - how did that happen? I secure erased and then let Windows installer do it's thing -apart from, I extended the System reserved to 300mb.

I should have just done what you advised!

No, that is the typical install when windows issues the 100MB partition. On As SSD, you notise it is in green meaning the alignment is OK.