New one on me - Partition Alignment

kwikbreaks

The freebie on Giveaway of the day today is a tool to "align partitions" -
http://www.paragon-software.com/business/partition-alignment/index.html

Now although this tool is free I don't want to devote time to fiddling around with my machines (especially as I'd not feel safe without taking a full backup first) if this is just snake oil.

The explanation makes sort-of sense but is there really any noticeable difference?

Freebie link (good for 13 October only) - http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/paragon-alignment-tool-special-edition-english-version/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+giveawayoftheday%2Ffeed+%28Giveaway+of+the+Day%29

John_Gray

Well, at 68.2 MB download and $30, whatever it does, it must be pretty wonderful!

"Boosts performance of disk subsystems up to 3 times" - yeah, right...

Richie-from-the-Boro

Anyone found the white paper on it ?

- I cant find it !

JasX

Richie-from-the-Boro wrote: »

Anyone found the white paper on it ?

- I cant find it !

I think there is only the one written referencing SQL servers, here it is:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd758814.aspx

EDIT.....
So in summary it seems partition alignment:

-has some merit and can boost performance by up to 30% in RAID arrays, seems vaguely applicable to single disks.

-good news is the program doesn't seem to do much you can't achieve yourself using the diskpart.exe standard windows function.

-I will however need to ponder what this means over at least one coffee.....

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc766465%28WS.10%29.aspx

diskpart.exe_extensions wrote:

align= n
Typically used with hardware RAID Logical Unit Number (LUN) arrays to improve performance when the logical units (LUs) are not cylinder aligned. Aligns a primary partition that is not cylinder aligned at the beginning of a disk and rounds the offset to the closest alignment boundary, where n is the number of kilobytes (KB) from the beginning of the disk to the closest alignment boundary. The align= n command fails if the primary partition is not at the beginning of the disk. If used with offset= n, the offset is within the first usable cylinder on the disk.

kwikbreaks

It seems that at least I'm not the only one who hasn't heard of this dreaded problem which apparently dates back years.

Based the evidence so far I'll probably be giving this one a miss then....