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The problem, in short, is that misaligned disk partitions cause the disk heads to have to work harder resulting in a significant loss of performance. Needless to say, we all want our DAWs to run as efficiently as possible.


Not sure how serious that 'problem' is. Do you have references and links to benchmarks?



A couple years ago I came accross the info about partition alignment when I was trying to tweak the performance on a Dell laptop to be a portable DAW to supplement my desktop system. There are a bunch of references and benches on the web (hunt the boards). The short answer is, in my personal experience, I did a lot of benchmarks comparing misaligned and aligned starting partition offsets and found read / write speed improved on disk partitions aligned to 1024 kilobytes. I'll look for the benches, but my recollection is the aligned partitions were ~6% to 15% faster read / writes.

My Dell lappy - which was an expensive top of the line machine when new - is 6 year old "dinosaur" now. IDE controller maxing out at UDMA 5, 5400RPM IDE drive. Aligned vs misaligned comparison on the IDE drive was around ~6-8% faster read / writes.

Installed a DVD/CD drive bay adapter in order to use a second SATA HDD to make it dual drive. And dual boot - one XP OS for DAW, the other for general use. The WD Caviar Black is 7200 RPM and Read / write speed comparison aligned vs misaligned was greater - ~12% with aligned partitions on the faster WD Black.

I have another adapter in the main HDD caddy for an Intel x-18M SSD and it blows the doors off the platter drive. Especially the seek times. I didn't mess around doing extensive aligned vs misaligned benches with the Intel SSD, but the initial install was misaligned (using Acronis - see note below) so I realigned the partition starting offset and once aligned it was ~15% faster read / write speed.

Connecting an external drive using an eSATA adapter PCMCIA card I get UMDA 7 speeds. The difference was greater aligned vs misaligned. My recollection on this comparison is a little fuzzy but it was more.

Seems that the faster the drive / controllers / connection is the more partition alignment makes a difference.

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Just checked the offset of my system disks here on a Vista system -> similar to your complained figures ... you said Microsoft corrected the problem with Vista an Win7 (?).



Depends on where and with what software the partitions were created. Vista / Win7 defaults to 1024k partition starting offset. Have you cloned the drive? Some cloning software create a 31.5k partition offset. *Note below* Was Vista pre-installed on your machine? Chances are the manufacturer used earlier os system to create the disk partition for installation. We have an HP lappy that came with Vista pre-installed that was misaligned to 31.5k (which reads 32256 bytes) in "system info"). Backed it up, realigned the partition >>using Vista<< and it defaulted the starting partition offset to 1024k, re-imaged the backup onto the drive. Faster, though I didn't save any bench comparisons on the HP machine.

(*note* Acronis, Partition Wizard which I have personally used destroyed the aligned partition created with windows or diskpart and installed the old 31.5k default (32256 bytes) though I recall seeing recently that a newer version or tool from Acronis correctly aligns the offset. Drive Image XML will use the aligned partitions made in windows or diskpart without changing the offset)

See for yourself - take a spare drive and partition it with Vista or Windows 7 and it will default to 1024k partition starting offset (which will read 1048576 bytes in "system information").