Looking for a Partitioning Program for Windows XP, that Creates 4K Aligned Partitions

spaceman5 said:
One note:
I am not talking about 4K Clusters,
I am talking about 4K Aligned Partitioning..
That's what you need on SSDs (or on Flash in general, e.g. USB Flash Drive, microSD/SD cards, etc),
or else, every cluster that is written, has to be written twice, which is slower and wears your storage device.
Click to expand...

I think I know what you meant. 4k has been used on hard drives about the same time achi became a thing. In around 2010 or something. Even before SSD became mainstream. The thing is, I don't think it is a thing for flashdrives and and sd cards. When you plug those the OS automatically knows they're not hard drives or SSD. So I don't know if they will make a 4k aligned partition for them. I never heard there was a need for 4k alignment for flash drives or sd cards. I think that 4k in combination with sata achi provided a slight speed boost. I could be wrong but that's how I see it.
 
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Well, the best way to find out is to simply try.

I will do a small test soon,
both on a non 4k-Aligned, and on a 4k-Aligned,
by writing a large file,
and seeing if there's a difference in the duration it takes.
 
But how do you check if they're 4k aligned ? I mean how do you even set them to be 4k aligned ?There was a free tool by acronis that checked that but it was only for hard drives or ssd. I remember it could be downloaded from Western Digital website.
 
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I use "AS SSD Benchmark".
Tho originally it's for checking Speed,
it also tells you if the drive (any drive, not just SSD like in its name) is 4K Aligned.

Please note,
it seems that AS SSD is no longer available for download from the original developer.,
only from spooky sites,
so don't download it,
there should be alternatives to it..
Maybe other people here can recommend
 
Every single hard drive, flash drive, and SSD benefits from alignment. The LBA translation occurring from starting on sector 63 adds overhead to every read/write command on every controller inside every device. I've even noticed a reading speedup in my cars playing USB flash drives music. I use Ranish Partition Manager from Hiren's Boot CD on every storage device I've ever touched (MBR, but it's not GUID compatible). You can specify start and stop sectors for everything, plus view the current LBA translation (LBA 255 heads, Large 240 heads, or anything other value meaning the controller is probably doing a bad job, as in future partitioning headaches or outright data loss.) Ranish also has a large FAT32 format function up to 2TB, and a nifty multi-boot installer that resides entirely in the IPL Initial Program Loader (not needing it's own additional partition).

I always start partitions on sector 16,384 (32K aligned), that's overkill compared to Win7 starting on 2,048 sector (4k aligned). Plus that gives me a handy 8mb FAT16 partition before my OS partition that I use with the Ranish multi-boot to put DOS 7.1 on and tools like cd drivers, ntfs drivers, lfn drivers, text editors, rar.exe, and of course Ranish itself for future editing. Every Windows setup.exe will overwrite the multi-boot, and everytime I put it right back on.

Inside Windows, I also use AOMEI Partition Manager 8.1 Standard Edition (free). It shows you the starting sector of every partition so you can check for alignment.
 
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