Is it necessary to align an SSD after cloning?

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Rob94hawk

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I just cloned my old 320 GB 5400 rpm HDD to a 480 GB SSD. The HDD was failing & had bad sectors so I used two different programs to clone the HDD to the SSD. I only did this because Macrium refused to clone C: but not the other partitions. Then I used AOMEI to clone C: cause it was the only program that would clone a corrupt HDD.

To make a long story short, the new SSD works just fine. The question is, do I need to align it now? Thanks.
 
If Windows 7 made the partition, then it should be alligned by default. You can still check according the guide, just to be sure.
 
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Your link is for a HDD. Don't know if it makes a difference or not. But I found this link, which is what I did.

https://www.howtogeek.com/270358/ho...id-state-drive-by-re-aligning-its-partitions/

However, if you migrated an existing Windows installation from an old mechanical hard drive to a solid state drive, the software may not have accounted for this. Some do, some don’t. If it didn’t, your partitions won’t be correctly aligned, and which can slow down your SSD. How much slower performance depends on your specific SSD.
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And according to this link my partitions, which are divisible by 4096, are aligned so that solves that.
 
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HDD or SSD makes no difference from OS side. Only difference is TRIM support, which has nothing to do with partition alignment.
 
As a quick check, IIRC the starting offset needs to be divisible by 4096:

AOjNX3j.png
 
I don't recall ever reading anything about alignment from the SSD manufacturers. But it wouldn't surprise me if an SSD worked better with at least 4K alignment. That's been standard practice since Vista.
 
I used to pay attention to it a lot in the 'olden days' but 99.99% of software/OS/systems nowadays appear to just take care of it.
 
You ABSOLUTELY need 4k alignment on any SSD. There's definitely a performance hit. AS SSD will tell you if the drive has the proper alignment. Cloning software like EaseUS has a setting to align to 4k. If you're attempting to re-align an OS drive after the fact, I do not suggest doing it in-line but rather duplicating it to another drive and then aligning it back in a cloning process.
 
Maxx said:
You ABSOLUTELY need 4k alignment on any SSD. There's definitely a performance hit. AS SSD will tell you if the drive has the proper alignment. Cloning software like EaseUS has a setting to align to 4k. If you're attempting to re-align an OS drive after the fact, I do not suggest doing it in-line but rather duplicating it to another drive and then aligning it back in a cloning process.
Click to expand...

I had a NVME drive that wasn't aligned for a month. It was then fixed and re-benched.

No change in performance.
 
daglesj said:
I had a NVME drive that wasn't aligned for a month. It was then fixed and re-benched.

No change in performance.
Click to expand...

It only affects writes. It can definitely have an impact. I have six SSDs in my main system and recently tested them since I just bought a few new ones and was transferring things. Performance hit on AS SSD was pretty significant, but even if "real world" performance is not greatly impacted it still means more host writes. But this is for older, AHCI drives...nevertheless, better safe than sorry.
 
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