Aligning hdd partitions. Aligning disk partitions using the Paragon Alignment Tool. What is partition alignment
Car wheels are a very important element, which plays not only a mechanical role, but also a decorative one. Today, alloy wheels are becoming increasingly popular, of which there are a huge number of types.
But no matter what material this product is made of, it can be damaged sooner or later. Today, alloy wheel repairs need to be carried out only at specialized enterprises that have all the equipment necessary for this.
To heat or not to heat
Alloy wheels are a universal design made from a special alloy. If this device is damaged, do not be discouraged, because in some cases it is possible to restore the structure.
Temperature can easily change the structure of the alloy, and it will lose its basic properties.
Disk repair
Alloy wheels are restored on special machines. In some cases, you can use a special hammer, which is used to level the damaged surface.
Let's consider the basic algorithm for restoring a cast disk on a machine:
- At the very beginning it is fixed in a special cartridge.
- Then the disk begins to slowly rotate in a circle, and a special device equipped with a hydraulic cylinder stretches the surface of the product. A marker is used for control.
The procedure takes about 10 minutes, but sometimes longer, depending on the nature of the damage. Sometimes it happens that the disk is not only bent, but also cracked.
To repair these damages, argon welding should be used.
It should be remembered that only well-trained welders with experience can weld cracks. Also note that this service is quite expensive, since the specialist works with non-ferrous metals.
In case of complex damage to a cast disk, you should contact special organizations that have good specialists and provide certain guarantees. You can find them on the Internet or by consulting with friends who have performed similar actions.
The advent of modern hard drives with 4 KB sectors (instead of 512 bytes) has made the problem of partition alignment relevant for both IT specialists and ordinary users. The thing is that a mismatch between the physical and logical distribution of data can lead to a sharp decrease in the performance of the entire system and a reduction in the service life of the equipment.
To explain the essence of partition alignment, let's illustrate the placement of data stored on a regular hard drive:
The figure shows a simplified segmentation scheme, where one partition occupies all the disk space and all sectors. The section corresponds to the first sector, the beginning of the section corresponds to the beginning of the first sector. However, this is an overly simplified scheme. After all, a section consists of logical units/blocks. Let's look at how they relate to sectors:
The figure shows that one cluster corresponds to two sectors. This means that when reading data from, say, a small text file from one cluster, the storage device is reading data from two sectors.
Please note: the beginning of the partition corresponds to the beginning of the first sector and all clusters are aligned to the sectors, therefore the partition is aligned. Data operations are performed at maximum speed.
Now let's look at the reasons for the discrepancy between partitions and sectors and the consequences of this phenomenon.
How and why does partition and sector mismatch slow down your hard drive?
The physical sector size of modern hard drives (for example, Western Digital) is 4096 bytes; at the physical level, data blocks of 4 KB in size are processed, but for external hardware and software such disks look like “traditional” ones, having 512 byte sectors. This allows for compatibility with earlier versions of the software. In such cases, another level is added – the compatibility level.
The figure shows three levels of data distribution. The lower level is, in fact, the hard drive and 4 KB physical sectors. The second level is an abstract representation in the form of 512-byte sectors for external systems. And the top level is an actual file system with 2 KB clusters, each equal to four abstract sectors and half a physical sector. Thus, 1 cluster = 4 abstract sectors = ½ physical sector.
Note that all three levels are aligned with each other and the beginning of the disk. Thus, reading or writing data from one cluster is implemented using four 512-byte sectors and one 4KB sector. The number of read-write operations is minimal; The disk is running at maximum performance.
But the situation takes a turn for the worse when the logic layer clusters are shifted relative to the underlying layers, as shown in this figure:
As you can see, the partition is offset relative to the beginning of the disk by one sector of 512 bytes. As a result, several logical clusters were associated with two 4KB physical sectors (second, fourth and sixth), resulting in a doubling of the number of read-write operations. In this case, system performance is reduced because the hard drive performs two operations on two sectors to manage data instead of one, as with properly aligned partitions.
What are the reasons for the bias? All versions of Windows operating systems prior to Vista, when creating volume clusters, focus on 512-byte sectors and place the start of the partition according to them, rather than with 4 KB sectors as shown in the previous figure, where the start of the partition is shifted by one 512-byte sector.
Usually the section starts from sector 63. 63 sectors is the established cylinder size for a disk, and some older versions of DOS or Windows require the partition to be aligned to the cylinder for proper addressing and access to sectors. Modern operating systems do not use the legacy CHS (cylinder/read head/sector) addressing scheme. But for a number of reasons, all versions of Windows prior to Vista create partitions using this rule.
Interestingly, partitions aligned to 63 sectors are, for purely mathematical reasons, not aligned to 4 KB sectors.
Obviously, 63 512 byte sectors does not correspond to a whole number of 4 KB sectors. Thus, the first and all subsequent disk partitions will be located with an offset.
What does the Paragon Alignment Tool do?
In the coming days, Paragon Software will introduce the Paragon Alignment Tool (PAT). Essentially, it moves partitions into a number of 512-byte sectors, flattening the volumes. For example, to align a 63-sector partition, you simply move it forward one 512-byte sector.
Now the beginning of the partition corresponds to the beginning of the 4KB sector, and this partition and all subsequent ones are located correctly.
PAT offsets the start of the partition by 2048 sectors of 512 bytes from the beginning of the disk, which corresponds to 1 MB, and is also great for 4 KB sectors.
The need to align partitions for SSDs
For SSD solid-state drives, the problem of incorrect partition placement is even more pressing than for traditional hard drives. The size of memory modules in modern SSDs is 4096 bytes, which is equivalent to 4 KB sectors. Thus, all the previously mentioned problems associated with partition alignment also arise when using an SSD.
However, in addition to reducing the speed of the file system, there is another problem that is unique to SSDs. SSD memory cells fail faster when there are many writes. Thus, if partitions are placed incorrectly on an SSD, not only the system speed is reduced, but the solid-state drive itself is also endangered.
Partition alignment using PAT eliminates redundant read/write operations, which can significantly increase the speed and extend the life of the SSD.
The need for partition alignment for SAN and RAID
RAID technology allows you to combine many hard drives and other storage devices into one large data array. The system perceives this array as one large storage device, and the data is distributed across all its resources. The volume after which data stops being written to one disk of the array and begins to be written to another is called the stripe size, which, in turn, can be very different (8 KB, 16 KB, 32 KB or 64 KB).
When using software or hardware RAID, system performance may be reduced if the starting position of the partition does not match the stripe size. In this case, the number of data operations on multiple disks of the RAID array increases.
To solve this problem, PAT shifts the partitions into 2048 sectors. This offset is suitable for most stripe sizes. Working with data becomes faster by eliminating redundant operations.
The need for partition alignment in virtual environments
Partition alignment in a virtual infrastructure environment is critical to performance, hardware life, and efficient storage utilization. Incorrect partition distribution results in the virtual machine receiving more data from the array than requested. This not only reduces operational efficiency, but this excess load also requires more resources to store data.
This figure shows the configuration of a VMware ESX\Server\vSphere server using RAID/SAN storage. Here, the partitions are incorrectly positioned on two levels at once, which leads to a serious decrease in performance. For example, to read data from the first cluster, the system must read three VMFS blocks and four RAID blocks (and even more stripes).
Currently, PAT cannot move VMFS volumes themselves, but can align partitions on virtual disks.
With this configuration, all volumes and partitions are located correctly and the overall speed of data operations doubles.
Hello to all specialists! I'll be brief. After transferring the operating system from one hard drive to another, I launched the AS SSD Benchmark program, selected my hard drive with the operating system installed in it and saw this warning - 31 K-BAD, the Internet says that the partitions on my hard drive are not aligned. What does this threaten me with and how can I actually align the partitions on the HDD?
Hello friends! Any hard drive formatted with a file system always has at least one partition with a drive letter on which we store our files. Correctly, the beginning of the partition should always correspond to the beginning of the first sector, which means that all clusters are aligned to the sectors, therefore the partition is aligned. In this case, all disk operations occur at maximum speed, and the file system works without errors.
- But sometimes, after the operation of transferring an operating system from one hard drive to another, a mismatch of partitions and sectors on the hard drive appears, this means that the performance of disk operations drops, which entails a general drop in the performance of the operating system, and in the case of solid-state drives, partition mismatch can lead to rapid wear of the SSD itself, since the memory cells of solid-state drives fail faster with a large number of write operations.
- To align hard drive partitions, you will need the paid version of AOMEI Partition Assistant. But you can for free.
You can align partitions on your hard drive using two tools: paid Paragon Alignment Tool and free AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard Edition, I suggest using the latter.
So, we have a real Hitachi Deskstar 7K80 HDS728080PLA380 hard drive with an unaligned partition.
In the upper left corner of the program window there should be two green lines, and the number in the second line should be divisible by 4, all this indicates that the partitions on the selected hard drive are aligned correctly, for example
If the offset is incorrect, then the second line will be red, this is exactly the problem I encountered the other day.
One of my friends complained about the slow operation of the operating system after transferring it to a new hard drive. During the verification process, it turned out that the partition on the hard drive was not aligned.
Note: You can download the latest version of the program on the developer’s website, but it is not possible to align partitions for free. Free partition alignment is available in the old version of the program 5.8, you can download it on my cloud storage at the link https://cloud.mail.ru/public/5BTv/KFwJkw59c
In the main program window, select with the left mouse one single partition of the HDS728080PLA380 hard drive and click on the button Partition alignment.
Click Apply.
Go.
The partition alignment process begins.
The section is aligned.
Run the AS SSD Benchmark program again, select the partition (D:) of the disk in it Hitachi Deskstar 7K80 HDS728080PLA380 and we see that the partition is aligned.
It all started with the fact that I used the Paragon Partition Manager 11 Professional program to create a partition on it. After creating the test section SSD looked like this (the disk is completely new - only the system is installed):
Due to my inexperience (at that time I had no idea what partition alignment was) I did not pay attention to the inscription 31K-BAD and continued installing drivers and programs, after which the test became like this:
As you can see, it is not much different from the first one. After further research on the topic SSD I came across one on the Internet, which described in detail about partition alignment and its impact on SSD. Here I will not go into technical details (if anyone is interested, follow the link above), but I will highlight the main thing - if alignment is incorrect, system performance decreases, since to manage data, the hard drive performs two operations in two sectors instead of one, as with correct partition alignment. This also affects the service life of solid-state drives, because they have the disadvantage of a limited number of rewrite cycles - if the alignment is incorrect, instead of one write operation (in one sector of the disk), two are performed (in different sectors). The last factor finally convinced me and I decided to level my SSD.
There are several ways to do this, I will describe the one I used - it is the simplest, most reliable and free :-). Disadvantages of this method: after leveling we had to reinstall the system; it requires Windows 7 installed, to which we connect our disk. Next we go to disk management delete old and create a new partition on the disk. Windows 7 itself aligns the partition as it should. After this, the disk test will look like this:
As you can see, the indicators have improved significantly. And they became even better after installing the AHCI driver from AMD:
This is how partition alignment affects SSD speed. I hope this article will be useful to you.
P.S. A year has passed since the note was written and some additions have appeared. If you install a “seven” on the SSD, then you don’t have to bother with preliminary alignment, because "Seven" will do everything right and all you have to do is make sure of it. It's worth being on the safe side when installing XP or some build of the "seven".
Finally, a video on the topic of SSD drives:
To begin with, I think it’s worth explaining what alignment is and why it is needed. Until recently, the traditional logical sector size (the smallest block of data) on any drive was 512 bytes. However, data fragments - clusters, which are processed by the operating system in one cycle, are usually much larger: and range in size from one sector (512 bytes) to 128 sectors (64 KB).
All this is a sad legacy of CHS (“cylinder/head/sector”) addressing, even before the advent of the EIDE standard in 1986. Since then, drives have acquired their own microcode and the CHS parameters they broadcast, to put it mildly, did not correspond to reality.
However, until now it was precisely this addressing that was de facto accepted as a standard, since all kinds of utilities like fdisk, right up to the Windows XP disk manager, still counted new partitions with an offset of 63 sectors from the beginning.
Starting with Windows Vista, Microsoft finally revised this outdated principle and therefore new disk managers began to take into account that drives could be partitioned into sectors not of 512 bytes, but, say, 1024, 2048 or 4096 bytes. But still, to ensure compatibility, all these devices have virtual capacity expressed in 512-byte sectors and do not use direct 4K addressing. All Windows operating systems prior to Vista allocate 512-byte sectors when creating volume clusters, and mark the beginning of the partition according to them, rather than to 4 KB sectors.
And since, as mentioned above, a partition usually starts from the 63rd sector, the problem of misalignment of partitions arises, because they, aligned across 63 sectors, cannot be mathematically accurately distributed over 4 KB sectors, since 63 sectors of 512 bytes each will not amount to without remainder an integer number of 4 KB sectors. As a result, the first and all subsequent disk partitions will be located with an offset.
If volumes are not aligned correctly, the cluster spans more physical sectors than it would occupy if aligned. As a result, more physical sectors must be erased and rewritten each time data is written. Increasing the number of operations not only reduces disk performance and overall system performance, but also directly affects the life of the SSD drive, since its memory cells are designed for only a certain number of read and write operations.
Therefore, SSD drives, if used with older operating systems, also need alignment. Although, purely technically, information is stored in them according to a different principle than on a HDD.
Many manufacturers of the first drives of this type initially simply equipped their devices with utilities for partition alignment before formatting the drives to the desired size or posted the corresponding software on the official website.
The release of Windows 7 (and now 8) solved this problem.
New operating systems, when creating logical partitions on drives, distribute sectors according to modern realities, which completely eliminates the problem of offset and the need for alignment.
If you still decide to stay with the usual “Piggy” for now, then before installing the system, align the partitions using an alignment utility, for example, the Paragon Alignment Tool.
Alignment should be performed on an EMPTY disk, otherwise it is easy to lose the aligned partition!
If you are afraid to get involved with alignment utilities, then the easiest way is to go to a friend with a “seven” on a computer or to any computer company and ask (for a “thank you” or for a “nice little thing”) to create and format the required number of partitions on your SSD.
As practice shows, the partition alignment procedure not only extends the life of SSD drives, but also significantly increases their performance, which, in principle, is what users expect from them.
Ivan Kovalev
