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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 is 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




Thanks for the info Noel. I'm not an expert like you. I do the best I can to understand very technical details that are outside of my realm of expertise. Hand me a guitar!:) I can report unequivocably that benched read / write speeds improved on my machines after aligning the drive partition starting offsets.

As it relates to Biab, the result (in my experience) is faster generation, lower latency, especially with real time midi accompaniment and lower cpu useage.
Thanks again