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It is believed that many inexperienced people have no idea about how to align and configure disk partitions in Windows. Therefore, this paper summarizes the causes and solutions of the problem. Through this article, I hope you can solve this problem.

Introduction

Many system administrators may not have heard of "disk partition alignment", and even some experienced storage administrators do not know much about partition alignment. What is the disk partition misalignment and why does it cause serious performance degradation? On the contrary, configuring the correct partition start position (Offset) setting enables the storage system to achieve greater performance potential. This paper introduces the disk partition alignment and gives the method of how to configure it on the Windows platform.

More information

What is disk partition alignment (Disk Alignment, Partition Alignment):

Windows disks have a structure called Master Boot Record (MBR), which has a default size of 63 Block (512 bytes each). Its existence results in the dislocation of 63 Block between the initial location of the disk and the initial location of the * partitions on the disk. If the single Track of the disk is greater than 63 Block. This results in the default initial location starting at 64. Make the Track in the file system and above the two Track in the disk. This misalignment can lead to performance degradation of the storage system because a single Track O request spans multiple disks, resulting in additional performance overhead for the storage system. Especially for some applications with larger random Iamp O, the impact will be greater.

For GPT Disk supported after Windows 2003, there will also be misalignment of disk partitions, but the structure is different. As shown in figure 1 (in Block,512 bytes), all partitions are made up of 1MB size (2048 Block), and * partitions start at LBA 34, that is, the 17KB size location. This means that all partitions will have 17KB misalignment. It will also affect the read and write performance of IWeiO.

Figure 1

Windows disk partition alignment configuration:

After configuring the disk partition alignment, in the example of the four partitions shown in the following figure, compared with the asymmetry in figure 1, the partition end address of these Windows in figure 2 is the same as the address in figure 1.

Figure 2

Disk partition alignment operation, only for Basic Disk of Windows. For Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2, there is no need to align disks, because this process has been done automatically when the operating system is partitioned, and software upgrades have brought a lot of convenience to administrators. For Windows 2003 and 2003 R2, and Windows 2000, it is recommended that you set the start offset (starting offset) to 64KB (128block). In addition, for the Dynamic Disk type, disk partition alignment cannot be performed. However, if there are already aligned partitions on the original Basic Disk, the original alignment will be retained after the conversion.

View the Windows disk partition alignment method:

1. View the partition alignment information of Basic Disk:

Method 1:

Enter the Diskpart command at the command line of Windows.

C:\ > diskpart

Select the corresponding Disk

DISKPART > list disk (shows all disks on this machine)

DISKPART > Select Disk X (x represents the disk number from 0 shown above)

DISKPART > list partition (displays all partition information starting from 1. There is a value of Offset/ offset on the far right. If it is a multiple of 8, your hard disk partition is aligned. If not, your disk partition is not aligned.)

Method 2:

Using the WMIC command, enter the following command under the Windows command line, and the column output of the command is the offset of the partition, which is divided by 512 to be the number of sectors:

Wmic partition get BlockSize, StartingOffset, Name, Index

two。 View the alignment information for Dynamic Disk:

Execute dmdiag.exe-v from the command line

In the command line output, the RelSec column in the LDM Volume area shows the starting sector of the Dynamic Disk.

Disk partition alignment configuration method:

For versions below Windows 2003 sp1, use the dispar command to set offset and partition alignment. The steps are as follows:

1. After installing in Windows Resource Kit, run the diskpar command from the command line in the Performance Tools directory:

two。 Using the diskpar-s N command, the following example defines the configuration of a misplaced 64KB that configures a disk of 20GB

For Windows 2003 sp1 and above, the dispar command is replaced by the dispart command.

1. Run the Diskpart command from the CMD command line

C:\ > diskpart

two。 Select the corresponding Disk

DISKPART > Select Disk X

3. Create a partition setting offset of 64KB (128Block). The following example is to create a partition of 1GB.

DISKPART > create partition primary size=1024 align=64

When performing partition alignment, it is important to note that the alignment needs to be done before the data is written on the disk and when the disk is just mapped to the host. Disk alignment is bound to damage the data on the disk, so if there is data that needs to be backed up first, pay attention to data security when operating.

Referenc

Aligning GPT Basic and Dynamic Disks pact N 300-004-075

Apply to

Windows 2000

Windows 2003

Windows 2008

After reading the above, have you mastered the method of disk partition alignment and configuration in Windows? If you want to learn more skills or want to know more about it, you are welcome to follow the industry information channel, thank you for reading!

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