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@ 2009/03/27We have all read by now the excellent SSD article by Anandtech, very few current MLC SSDs work perfect out of the box; one of the major reasons for this is because the partition table is not aligned correctly with the start of the 4k pages on the SSD; so instead of doing one operation on the SSD, multiple are done to by the controller to correct the misalignment. XP makes a partition by default is installed on sector 63, which leads to incorrect alignment out of the box;
By using Diskpart you can correctly align an empty partition (to 32/64/128/256/etc) on your SSD and reduce the negative of current MLC drives when it comes down to writing random 4k files.
This brings us to this test where an end user got an OCZ Apex and aligned it starting at different sectors; how does impact performance? Check out the table below:
Comparing the sector 63 unaligned with the 128 sector alignment is a very large difference when doing reading operations, for writing 128 also seems to be the best choice overall;
of course this is just one benchmark and they used a MLC with internal RAID-0; so don't draw any permanent conclusions just yet
By using Diskpart you can correctly align an empty partition (to 32/64/128/256/etc) on your SSD and reduce the negative of current MLC drives when it comes down to writing random 4k files.
This brings us to this test where an end user got an OCZ Apex and aligned it starting at different sectors; how does impact performance? Check out the table below:
Comparing the sector 63 unaligned with the 128 sector alignment is a very large difference when doing reading operations, for writing 128 also seems to be the best choice overall;
of course this is just one benchmark and they used a MLC with internal RAID-0; so don't draw any permanent conclusions just yet
