TI 2011 and SSD Drive

Not sure what you mean about "play a image bake"??

I love acronis 2011 for ssd. I cloned my hdd to the ssd and the alignments were perfect. It even fixed my unaligned OEM 16MB partion to a 8MB ALIGNED partition. :)

Yes, you can restore a spin disk image to an SSD.
Before restoring, remove the original disk and place the new SSD at the same place as the source disk. Be careful with static electricity when you manipulate the SSD.
If the size of the SSD is different from the size of the spin disk, when you restore, boot the computer with the Acronis recovery CD and restore each partition at a time in the same order they are laid out on the original disk (use Windows disk management to check the layout before you disconnedt the original disk, including which partition is active).
Restoring each partition alone will allow you to resize only the user partitions (includinc c:\system).
- Do not resize any other partition,
- Leave the default 1MB offset before the first partition,
- Mark the right partition primary, active,
- Do no change the drive letters.

Finally restore the MBR +track 0 and the disk signature.

Hello,
I've been "lurking" here a little bit doing some research on how to clone my current hdd to a new ssd. I've done this before on my Mac, but it seems a little less straightforward in Win 7, so I've been trying to do my homework.

At any rate, the posts here have been very helpful, and I did manage to successfully clone to the new ssd. It seems to be working very well, but I wonder if I may have left out an important step. I did a "manual" clone, but I didn't go partition by partition, and so I am not sure if I got the 1 MB offset in where it needs to be. It didn't seem obvious to me that it was there. If I go back and clone part by part, will I get an option to add something like that? I want to make sure I get the drive to perform as it should. If I look at disks in System Information (msinfo32.exe) it looks to be there. It also seems that there are 10MB offsets before partitions 1 through 3.

Crazy as this may be - I put the ssd into a netbook. I wanted to see how fast I could get this machine to go. If I didn't screw anything up, then I think I have to conclude that the Atom processor is too much of a bottleneck to really see a significant performance boost.

I have another ssd in a C2D MacBook (2007), and that machine screams.

Anyway, I would appreciate any input. Thanks again for all the posts that really helped me get this done.

Pat

Use this illustration to check if your SSD has the correct offset as shown here.

Thanks Grover.
Looks like I'm okay in terms of the offsets.
I guess an Atom powered netbook - at least a single core 1.66GHz - is too underpowered to really take advantage of an ssd.
Thanks again for all the help!
Pat

I'm just going to post this question into this thread instead of starting a new thread. Hope that's ok.

I recently swapped out my ASUS Rampage II Extreme mobo for a Rampage III Extreme, so that I could take advantage of an on-board 6GB Sata controller for a new SSD I wanted to get (yeah, I know that the Marvell 9128 is only running on one lane of PCIe, and that I won't get the best performance out of the SSD, but that's another issue...) The motherboard swapout went without a hitch.

My system disk is a WD 300G Velociraptor with C: and D: partitions. It is running in IDE mode. I had trouble when I first built the system (2 years ago), and mistakenly thought it was related to the Intel storage controller, so I put it into IDE mode and unwittingly just left it as I went forward. So now I haven't been able to use the Intel RAID controller (I didn't want to go through the headache and uncertainty of moving the boot drive from IDE to AHCI mode). I have this new 256G, 6G/s SSD (Crucial M4) that I want to replace my Velociraptor with. That SSD will be running in AHCI mode on the 6GB controller. I only want to copy/clone my C: drive to the SSD, and then I will repartition the Velociraptor into a single ~300G partition (D:).

I hope I have explained the situation adequately...

Now I hate to be dense about this, but I'm not sure that all the other advice that I've been reading about in the Acronis Forum can be applied to my case. Can it?

If I plug the M4 into the Velociraptor's spot, and restore the C: backup to it, won't I still have the same IDE/AHCI problem?

- s.west

You should be fine if you have Win7. I don't know about XP and Vista: do they automatically switch to AHCI? You might have to research how to verify AHCI change in those OSs.
Swap your disk, change the BIOS settings, restore the image.

I've found recently that this latest 2011 TIH product has been creating misaligned partitions for the last few revisions now, up to and including revision 6868 which I just confirmed tonight.

I had believed that the product was aligning them properly on clone operations (I only use the bootable ISO media) but I did a test clone tonight and confirmed the partition offset was misaligned using msinfo32. I double checked my main pc that I run the software on, and confirmed it misaligned the C300 SSD that I upgraded to a few months ago as well (partition offset of 32,256). What's up Acronis...I thought this was supposed to be happening automatically since TIH 2010?

My test that confirmed it today was on a Dell laptop to an SSD in a USB enclosure, but the misalignment on my main PC would have been an internal SATA to SATA transfer, so it can happen with both internal and external interfaces.

Charles,

ATI is pretty good at aligning SSDs, but I recommend to choose the manual cloning method, or to restore each partition at a time, so that ATI shows you exactly how it will place and size the partitions on the new disk. In most cases, a visual check is enough. In all cases where the destination disk is of a different size, you will have to make some adjustments to the defaults proposed by ATI.

Pat L wrote:

You should be fine if you have Win7. I don't know about XP and Vista: do they automatically switch to AHCI? You might have to research how to verify AHCI change in those OSs.
Swap your disk, change the BIOS settings, restore the image.

Thanks for the response.

I ended up booting my rescue disk, using the Universal Restore (from the Plus Pack, which I upgraded to), and just restored my C: drive backup directly to the SSD. Then I just modified my disk settings in the BIOS and booted to the new drive. It worked really well...

If ATI claims that they have "full support for SSD's" their automatic cloning method should do the partition realignment by default, as any user would assume that a product such claims would do it automatically. I'm tired of wasting time and energy (repeatedly patching, making new ISO images, recloning, sending feedback to Acronis etc) with no resolution while waiting for Acronis to fix this, after trusting their marketing claims about the 2011 product. This was the only reason I upgraded to the 2011 product from 2010, and I've been buying it since version 9 so I'm less than impressed.

I bought Paragon Alignment Tool 3.0 and tested it on the misaligned laptop, which worked like a charm so I've now used it to realign my main PC running ATI 2011.

My PCMark05 hard disk performance score increased to 20,975 compared to 16,375 with ATI 2011's misaligned clone job. That's a hit of almost 30% on average performance. The performance hit on writes is far more severe than that score represents, as reads aren't substantially affected by misalignment. Unfortunately I didn't run Crystal Diskmark on the misaligned drive to show the severe performance hit that it creates on writes, but the following is an example from my logs of a misaligned WD Green EARS 1TB drive. Check out how severely random write operations are affected:

Misaligned partition offset:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0 x64 (C) 2007-2010 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

Sequential Read : 111.824 MB/s
Sequential Write : 106.390 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 24.883 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 10.114 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.537 MB/s [ 131.0 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 0.111 MB/s [ 27.0 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 1.625 MB/s [ 396.7 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 0.110 MB/s [ 27.0 IOPS]

Test : 1000 MB [D: 0.0% (0.1/931.5 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2010/09/11 23:49:43
OS : Windows 7 Ultimate Edition [6.1 Build 7600] (x64)

Partition re-created with correctly aligned offset, ~15 minutes later in the same session:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0 x64 (C) 2007-2010 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

Sequential Read : 111.956 MB/s
Sequential Write : 107.867 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 41.100 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 57.243 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.546 MB/s [ 133.3 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 0.855 MB/s [ 208.7 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 1.548 MB/s [ 378.0 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 0.671 MB/s [ 163.9 IOPS]

Test : 1000 MB [D: 0.0% (0.1/931.5 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2010/09/12 0:02:26
OS : Windows 7 Ultimate Edition [6.1 Build 7600] (x64)

No doubt that alignment is a big deal with SSDs.

Whatever a tool might claim to do automatically, I personally prefer verifying that the critical settings will be applied (in this case the creation of the offset) before proceeding.

As you can see in the above CDM results, it's a big deal for magnetic 4k sector / advanced format drives as well--all random write operations are 6-8x slower.

Tried it again on another machine this afternoon with revision 6868 ISO, I even chose the custom option so that it wasn't running in auto mode. Resulting cloned copy had the main partition offset misaligned, confirmed with msinfo32 and ssd alignment calculator.

I just brought my SSD (M4 128) and I just want to make sure I am doing everything correctly so I dont get alignment issues. There are so many ways to do this I just want your expert opinion on the easiest/safest way.

I have:
1. windows 7 x64 laptop with SATA3 Hard Drive
2. Crucial M4 128 GB
3. USB SATA drive enclosure
4. Acronis 2011

Partition Disk #0, Partition #0
Partition Size 100.00 MB (104,857,600 bytes)
Partition Starting Offset 1,048,576 bytes
Partition Disk #0, Partition #1
Partition Size 297.99 GB (319,965,626,368 bytes)
Partition Starting Offset 105,906,176 bytes

Based on the information above, do I need to clone partition 0 then partition 1? How exactly do I install them in order? And what size do I need to select for each partition?

Sorry for all those questions, I been searching around for the past 10 hours! and school is about to get really crazy for me. I sincerely thank anyone that is willing to help.

The problem with ATI 2011 isn't imaging a disk like yours (when using the bootable ISO like I do), because your main partition #1 offset is already aligned as you can confirm here:

http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/other/157

ATI 2011's problem is that if the partition isn't already aligned, it will use the existing misaligned offset and create a new image with misaligned partitions as well. In my books, if Acronis claims they have 4k sector support, it shouldn't ever be creating misaligned partitions period. Any disk that is imaged should automatically be cloned with aligned partition offsets, otherwise the product isn't imaging properly for 4k sector drives and is creating severe write performance issues. If it even had an option of creating misaligned partitions, it should warn the user that the imaging configuration is not recommended and force an override with an explanation of the problem they are about to create.

Charles,
Some general comments. One roundabout way of getting proper alignment (1 mb)out of a misaligned disk is to use installed Windows 7 or Vista (see note) and create a small single partition on the target drive. Partition size does not matter and format is not needed.

Then do a recovery or clone when booted from the CD. The 1 mb offset put there by Windows will hold during the restore and I believe it will hold via the clone. The manual method works best for the clone as you can adjust your own partition sizes and confirm that the starting offset (free space before) is correct and user can adjust the "free space before" if necessary.

Acronis seems to apply the existing starting offset. If source starting offset is correct, it will carry the correct offset forward.
If starting offset wrong on source, the wrong offset will be applied unless corrective steps taken to correct the error during the restore or during the manual clone.

You might be interested in reading my cloning or restore guides listed inside my signature index below. Items 3-BB, 3-CC and 3-DD may be of interest. All show how to adjust the "free space before" to get the 1 MB offset but creating the partition in Windows first makes it more fool proof. Adjust the column indicators (as shown in the guide) and you will see what the alignment will be before the process is committed.

Note: Diskpart (Win7 or Vista) can also be used instead of installed Windows to create the single partition of any size. Diskpart for XP Pro or the installed XP Pro will create a bad offset and not to be used.

For the record, I upgraded my 60GB OCZ SSD vertex2 to 120GB OCZ Solid3 successfully Using ATI 2011 Home Update 3 6942.

I had done a new windows 7 install, accepting all the windows defaults as far as partitions , cluster size etc. The result was a 100MB partition, a 6GB empty area without a partition, to use for empty space, which I understand increases speed of the SSD), and the roughly 48GB system partition. The drive was in proper alignment.

In ATI I backed up on disk level (didin't select partition method) and I checkmarked make an image backup and checkmarked to image empty space. I also had it verify the backup.

I then did the restore to the 120GB disk. The result was 2 partitions, aligned. No problems. All the space was used tho. Oh well not a problem of ATI.

I just mention it so people can have a case study.

Pat L wrote:

No doubt that alignment is a big deal with SSDs.

Whatever a tool might claim to do automatically, I personally prefer verifying that the critical settings will be applied (in this case the creation of the offset) before proceeding.

Hi, sorry to bother, but still I don't understand.

It is clear now that ATI 2011 is not ensuring correct alignment 100% of the times.

With that said, I have an ASUS G73JH that has 3 partitions on the primary disk (500GB), the one I want to move to a new Samsung 830 256GB SSD. The first partition is hidden (it contains ASUS recovery stuff).

The situation is that while the first partition is correctly aligned, the second and third ones (being the C: and D: partitions) currently are not.

So my questions is: if I clone the source disk using ATI 2011, what exactly I should do/check to ensure that the second/third partitions I'll be pulling to the SSD (the C: and D: partitions as I said) will be correctly aligned from the beginning? What do you mean with "verifying" ?

Thanks in advance.

Best,

MT

Marco,
You are right to highlight that it is not because the first partition of a disk is alignment that each partition is aligned.
To ensure proper alignment of a disk, each partition offset has to be divisible evenly by 4,096 when express in bytes. Even this rule is actually a general rule for the majority of cases. For accurate criteria, you'd have to use the calculator here: http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/other/157

In the vast majority of cases, partitions sizes are created in whole number of megabytes. So if the first partition is aligned with an offset of 1MB (1,024X1,024=1,048,576 bytes is divisible by 4,096), and if each partition has a whole number of megabytes as a size, it follows that each partition is aligned.

If you current disk is not aligned, it is probably because one partition has not a whole number of megabytes as size (weird, I guess), and/or there is some unallocated space between 2 partitions that is now a whole number of MB. Could you verify?

you could:
- use diskpart to recreate each partition with exactly the same size as the original disk rounded up to the next whole MB or,
- use ATI to restore the first partition with the 1MB offset and resize each partition to a whole number of MB.

I don't know how you ended up with at least one partition that has a size that is not a whole number of megabytes. Maybe somehow one partition got scaled in some operation...

You're definitely right.

For whatever reason, ASUS G73JH's stock partition scheme implies all the partitions (?) not having a whole number of megabytes as size (please see attachment).

Anyway, if I got the picture, restoring one partition at a time and resizing each one with a whole number of megabytes as size should do the trick, right? Last thing I should do then is to restore source disk's MBR/signature.

Last question: is the 1MB offset you mention for the first partition created automatically or should I take care of this also?

Thanks and best,

MT

Remember, a whole number of MB (1MB=1024x1024bytes), not GB (1GB=1024MB). I am saying this because your picture show sizes in GB...

Otherwise yes, you have the right idea.

About the 1MB offset: the first partition you will restore will be the small on on the left of your picture. After you have selected the destination as your new disk, ATI from the disk will show you a picture of how it will be laid out. There will be 2 cursors to (a) set the offset on the left, (b) to change the size on the right.
Only the first partition should have a 1MB offset. The other partitions don't need an offset.

 Thanks for the answer.

If I see the partitions details (see attachments) for the first one I see:

free space before = 0 bytes

free space after = 1,19 MB (not whole?)

If I got it right, there's no 1MB offset and the number of megabytes is not whole, right?

To sum it up, if I:

1) move one partition at a time

2) use a whole number of megabytes for each partition size

3) use a whole number of megabytes for the "free space after" parameter of each partition

4) take care of the 1MB offset for the first partition

I should be ok. At least that's my current understanding.

Last doubt is why ATI 2011 shouldn't be doing all of the above automatically. But as long as I can do it manually, well, ...

Thanks.

Best,

MT

1) Yes
2) Yes
3) Don't leave any space after a partition, EXCEPT the last one because you might HAVE to (you don't care about that space and it is useless so keep it as small as possible).
4) Yes

ATI will not realign an image that is not aligned and restored as a whole disk. Only when you restore a single partition on a blank non-partitioned disk will ATI propose automatically a 1MB offset.
ATI will keep aligned a disk that was aligned, although there is a risk when you move to a bigger disk because ATI will scale automatically all partitions if you don't restore each partition individually. I have not observed whether this scaling could result in non-alignment. Just in doubt, I always do a manual (partition by partition restore) when I move to a different disk.

 Thanks for the clarifications.

Just my 2 cents, to make Acronis products (I've been using for years) better: please, please, be more clear when you claim full SSD support, since correct alignment is a critical attribute of an SSD (as opposed to traditional spinning HDDs, usually not being affected by misalignments, apart from specific cases), that cannot be left up to fate only because source disk was misaligned already.

I'd suggest:

1) a simulation mode that could be run before a whole-disk cloning is started, giving comprehensive information about expected target-state alignment and relevant advices

2) at least a clear warning, suggesting exactly what you said in your last post (probably not suitable for newbies, but at least it's something)

But I've been using ATI 2011 only so far, perhaps ATI 2012 offers all of the above already...