Should I change the alignment on my SSD?

[Clem]

Hello there, I have an Intel 520 series 120GB SSD. I ran AS SSD which told came up with '31 K - Bad'.
The speeds I got were 480MBps read and 120MBps write. Very low, but I believe the motherboard is faulty (the 3rd party SATA3 and USB3 are also not working).

I used an upgrade copy of Windows, so I installed Windows XP to the SSD first and then used the Win7 upgrade disc to do a clean install.
I read Win7 is suppose to set the correct alignment, but I deleted the partition before install, so I'm not sure why it was set 31K.

Should I change the alignment? If so, to what?

 

[solarmystic]

Hello Clem,

If you wish to get the best performance from your SSD you would ideally change its alignment to something that is divideable by 4. (Like 1024 or 2048 KB)

There's a nifty tutorial here on this forums that'll guide you through the process:-

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/113967-ssd-alignment.html

If you wish to realign the drive and it already has an active OS on it, and do not wish to have to perform another clean install after realigning, you can use this partition alignment tool from Acronis for SSDs:-

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=20849

Hope that helps!

 

[Clem]

Hello Clem,

If you wish to get the best performance from your SSD you would ideally change its alignment to something that is divideable by 4. (Like 1024 or 2048 KB)

There's a nifty tutorial here on this forums that'll guide you through the process:-

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/113967-ssd-alignment.html

If you wish to realign the drive and it already has an active OS on it, and do not wish to have to perform another clean install after realigning, you can use this partition alignment tool from Acronis for SSDs:-

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=20849

Hope that helps!

Thank you, I'll try that Intel tool.

 

[Clem]

Thank you very much, that was very painless and seems to have worked. Has improved drive performance a bit, but the drive is still severely under-performing which I believe is due to faulty controllers on my ASRock Z77 Fatal1ty Pro.

 

[solarmystic]

Glad to know it helped somewhat!