Any issues with 4096 alignment for SSD? Also does Acronis require Windows 7 200mb hidden partition for backup/restore?
I'm planning on installing Windows 7 Professional on my shiny new 256GB SSD next week. I want to make sure my setup works with Acronis True Image Home 2012 for backups and restores as I'm doing a few non-standard things which I'll describe below:
1. I'm using a 4096 alignment for the SSD instead of the default 1024 alignment Windows 7 would have used to format the drive. Why I am doing this? See below:
Why 4096 as partition offset?
SSDs: It is best to use 4K (4096) alignment (partition offset) over the default 1K (1024) because of how SSD's perform their read/write operations. SSDs are erased in 4K blocks.
Will Acronis have any issues with this?
2. For installing Windows 7 Professional, I will not have Windows install the 100-200mb hidden system partition at the front of the SSD. I did the same thing with my current Windows 7 install on my hard drive and did not have any issues at all. So Windows 7 will be installed to my SSD which will be composed of one single partition. Will Acronis have any problems with backing and restoring this Windows 7 install that lacks the hidden partition?
Thanks for any replies!
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If you just NTFS format a drive with Windows GUI tools, they'll do a 1024 alignment, but you can customize this alignment by using the diskpart command. Here's a how-to on how to create an aligned partition in Windows 7: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/113967-ssd-alignment.html
In those directions they do a 1024 offset, however many SSD guides recommend doing a 4096 offset instead, so I used the command: Create partition primary align=4096
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Tec,
When you enter the offset in diskpart, it is expressed in KB by default.
So, first, the offset you need must be divisible by 4 when expressed in KB (1024bytes) or by 4096 when expressed in bytes (which is the same).
Why not choose 4KB as the offset then? Well, read on...
The offset must also be divisible by the NAND erase block size, which is typically 512KB. So any offset smaller than 512KB could get you into trouble if you have a typicall SSD...
Finally, 1024KB is chosen by default because it meets the previous conditions and the last one: it can be easily divided by most of the strip sizes in RAID configuration (64KB, 128KB, 256KB), as well by the less frequent strip sizes of 512KB and 1024KB.
So, there you have it. The minimum recommended offset is 1024KB, and multiple of this will work just fine also! So, yes, 4096 offset will work.
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