Areca TrueImage 2010 - X-25M Partition Alignment

O

okashira

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I used TrueImage Home (boot disk) to create an image of my win7 install w/ drivers, etc of my intel x25m G2.

I set it to do a full image of the entire drive (100mb partition and ~74 gb partition) together.

Yesterday, I secure erased the drive and did a restore using the boot disk and the image.

I checked the partition alignment once booted to windows and it's wrong. Something like 32K offset for the 100mb partition, and as a result, incorrect alignment of the main partition.

This was not the case when the image was created.

What can I do to get TrueImage to make the partition offset correct? Partition the drive first with windows boot disk? just image the main partition and use that only?

Thanks for any suggestions.
 
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How do you check for partition alignment in Windows7 ?
I just copied my OS partition to my New Intel SSD G2 yesterday too.
 
Read this thread for checking alignment: http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1464343

However, I'm thinking all these people with OCZ drives that NEED partition alignment for the drive to work optimally are making everyone else worry too much.

As my benchmarks seem to all be fine. And I'm running WinXP with the wrong alignment to my knowledge.
http://www.crowdcontrolusa.com/overclock/80gb-ssd.gif <--- my benches look fine

First of all if you do a clean install of Windows 7 on your SSD your alignment will be correct.

Second of all, even if you drive isn't aligned I haven't seen any evidence of Intel's drives suffering.

SOMEONE please show me some evidence that Intel's drives suffer from improper alignment.
 
I'm new to this whole SSD thing (just picked up a Corsair P256) but I think I found what you are looking for here - http://forum.acronis.com/forum/4140

Win7/Vista default to a 1024kb offset when formatting. The whole alignment thing is for users with SSDs running Windows XP which defaults to a 32k offset (which happens to be in the middle of an erase block and causes the performance issues).

To check your offset, open a command prompt as admin and run DiskPart. Commands follow:

;Find your SSD
list disk

;Select your SSD
select disk X (x being the number of your SSD)

;View information
list partition

That will show your partition size and your offset. Hope this helps.
 
So my data disappeared again.

I secure erased again, and this time, i booted with windows 7 and created the partition there and formatted. Shut down, the booted with TrueImage and reimaged both partitions (100mb and 74gb). This time alignment stayed correct. seems TrueImage at least doesnt recreate the patitions if they're already there.

So that solved the problem, but Areca still needs to fix this.
 
I have understood it to be an Acronis TrueImage problem. Areca's control or management over the partitions is not the issue here. The solution that was found above, is the same one that I am aware of, using Acronis to restore partitions individually, but not for restoring whole disks as it does not align properly.
 
Yeah, from what I understand is that Arconis is kind of dropping the ball and using the old defaults. I'm surprised they didn't get it right with the latest version of TI that supports Windows 7.
 
When I tell the software to image the drive, it should do jsut that, and this would include partition offset information!

it's hard to imagine that after 1.5 decades of software development of this kind, they can't get it right. :p

Maybe if I choose "sector by sector," backup, it would have picked it up? I can test this.
 
Heh, I would be interested to know what happens. Go for it. However, sector copies are quite wasteful in terms of storage space, and will be much slower, but I think you realize that. I agree with the statement though, that after all these years, you would think the basics like this would not be an issue.
 
The backup software that comes with Win7 works well and preserves alignment. If your alignment is messed up, you can create an image backup of the system, delete the improperly aligned partition, recreate the partition aligned correctly and restore the image to the new partition.

Also, as far as alignment is concerned. The real world effects aren't as drastic on SSDs with large on drive cache. I still stress the importance of aligning the drive correctly. These things are expensive and every bit of performance I can squeeze out of mine, I will. On a misaligned drive, it's splitting a page that's bad for performance. XPs default alignment of 31.5k splits a page in half, meaning it takes 2 seperate writes to fill said page. No SSD is physically immune to that. They're all broken down into nand blocks which are further divided by pages. 128 pages = 1 block on most SSDs. Sometimes, performance doesn't suffer until the drive has a bit of data on it. It's not always data throughput that suffers either, sometimes it's IOs. Need to setup IOmeter to see those effects. All in all, even a misaligned SSD will out perform a Vraptor.

Jason
 
NfiniteZERO said:
Yeah, from what I understand is that Arconis is kind of dropping the ball and using the old defaults. I'm surprised they didn't get it right with the latest version of TI that supports Windows 7.
Click to expand...

Yes, the default settings do not appear to preserve partition offset (which is important because it ensures alignment of logical blocks to physical erase blocks). However, it appears that you can preserve alignment with some tweaks to the advanced settings. This guy even posted a video.

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=54509
 
PHiZ said:
Yes, the default settings do not appear to preserve partition offset (which is important because it ensures alignment of logical blocks to physical erase blocks). However, it appears that you can preserve alignment with some tweaks to the advanced settings. This guy even posted a video.

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=54509
Click to expand...

Wow, look at all those steps. Here's my guide:

1.) image your drive (full drive) TrueImage 2010

2.) secure erase your ssd

3.) use win7/vista install to create partitions and format your ssd

4.) restore ssd with trueimage (full drive, both partitions)

this maintained alignment for me, rather, it's win7 inst disc that gets the alignment right, and trueimage just doesn't mess with it.


What I like, backing up my SSD with clean win7 install and all drivers and some basic apps literally takes 55 seconds for the whole drive! (to my raid 6 array.) Restore take a little over 2 minutes.
 
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