Hi Lawrence,

Here's a web page that I've found about partition misalignment. It explains it very well.

http://www.storagereview.com/impact_misalignment

If I am interpreting this and your information correctly, the problem is related to hard drives that operate beyond a physical sector size of 512 bytes (say 4K sectors). This interpretation is also supported by Microsoft at

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929491

From what I can find, the RAID disk to which the MS article refers also has 4K sectors.

I notice, from using System Information, that my USB drive from PG Music has a physical sector size of 512 bytes. As previously mentioned, 32,256/512 = 63. Further investigation reveals that these 63 sectors (with a physical sector size of 512 bytes) are perfectly normal; my USB drive is operating exactly the way that Windows was designed to operate and on a sector size that is a perfect fit for this operating system. If, however, my USB drive had a different sector size (e.g. 4K), then (from what I read) I would have potential alignment issues. At the moment, though, it seems that all is well for me.

Regards,
Noel

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