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As per another post here on SU, I'm trying optimise performance of a USB 3.0 attached SSD drive. I've been told that aligning to 4k boundaries should improve performance(?).

So how can I check that and fix it?

(Windows 7 Premium)

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Jon Cage
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  • The simplest solution would be to use a Linux tool since those are going to be free. What tools have you tried? – Ramhound Feb 18 '14 at 16:40
  • I haven't tried any - googling didn't turn anything up. I was hoping there'd be a native Windows command. – Jon Cage Feb 18 '14 at 16:46
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    Did you partition the SSD using Windows Vista or later? If so, it's already properly aligned. – Daniel B Feb 18 '14 at 17:11
  • possible duplicate of [Advanced format partition alignment](http://superuser.com/questions/375975/advanced-format-partition-alignment), [How to check the partition alignment on an SSD drive?](http://superuser.com/questions/132296/how-to-check-the-partition-alignment-on-an-ssd-drive) – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 Feb 18 '14 at 18:16
  • @Danial B: Yes, partitioned with Windows7 – Jon Cage Feb 20 '14 at 09:01

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To be honest: don't try setting 4K boundaries, as you will only mess things up. Your problem is Inateck docking station: it has just mediocre controller on-board. If I were producer of such docks, I would not think of better controller, as people tend to use docking stations for HDDs, not SSDs (and 170MB/s is way faster than any consumer HDD will achieve).

If you're interested, even motherboards of full size desktops have same problems. It is widely known, that many motherboard producers use Marvell chips with SATA controllers (for additional on-board SATA ports) that have problems with reaching more than circa 350MB/s, even though they are SATA3.

Btw. why are you using SSD as external disk? SSD biggest advantage is random access (random read/write) that gives you large comfort while working on applications or OS that is installed on the SSD.

mwilczynski
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  • I'm just using it as a test platform. We have some algorithms to test which rely on reading in huge data sets (200GB+ so no chance of caching them in RAM). I just wanted to see what happened if I removed the storage bottleneck with an SSD but even if I run on smaller data sets which are cached by Windows I'm still limited by I/O rather than our processing algorithms. This then became more of a 'how can I eek every last performance point out of the file system for as little as possible' challenge ;-) – Jon Cage Feb 18 '14 at 23:17
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Run AS SSD Benchmark and check if this value is green:

enter image description here

If it is green your SSD is correctly aligned.

magicandre1981
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