DiracDeBroglie

Jaclaz, Yes, now it has become clear to me why alignment of partitions is not enough when dealing with FAT (and maybe other file systems) . Fortunately, I'll be using NTFS on the drive. You have been a great help, without your info I would still be dangling on Google and waisting many more manhours. It's still not over for me; I still need to re-partition the drive to NTFS under Win7, and perform analysis on the drive to see if all is ok. I'll be back on this thread maybe later. I still need to install a SSD next coming few weeks or so. Also that may still raise some performance issues, I'll see. johan

Jaclaz, I just ran the PartitionInfo utility from Symantec. The 4k-byte sector 2TB drive that I have is from Seagate and came formatted as FAT32X. According to PartitionInfo the start sector is 2048, so can be divided by 8; also the number of hidden sectors is 2048. So that data looks consistent but what one would expect taking into account the format is FAT32X. However, in the header of PartitionInfo there are several error messages saying that the partition didn't begin on Head Boundary, ended after end of disk, .... Note all the testing is done on WinXP. So, I'll reformat the 4k-byte sector drive asap with Win7. johan

>>By default Windows 7 will align the start of the partition to a 4 K boundary. Q: Do you have any genuine Microsoft documentation of that? Some KB document, clearly and explicitly mentioning that Win7 by default aligns partitions to a 4K boundary. I need to know for sure before I continue working with the 4K HD. I cannot aford to take any risk as the 4K HD of mine will be a backup drive filling up quickly. Any problems lateron will cause me lots of extra work. >>Namely first partition will start at CHS 0/33/32 or LBA 2048. (and all following partitions will all be aligned as well) Q: Cilinder/Head/Sector but what sectors are those? Is the number 32 related to 4K or 512e sectors? As for the Logical Block Addressing, what is the block size? Is that the block size defined during formatting of the external HD, that is, 4kB, 8kB, ... 64kB? In case of large block size, one could lose a significant amount of disk space, in the order of many MB!? >>Having a partition aligned as above makes sense if the partition is NTFS formatted. Q: How come? Are you insinuating that for other formats (fat32, exfat,....) partition alignment would make less sense? Thanks, Johan

Hi, Got a external USB3.0 2TB drive with 4K physical sectors. It does seem to emulate 512-byte logical sectors though, so it is 512e sector drive. However, there might be a problem with the partition boundary alignment. I would like to partition the drive using the Disk Management tool in Windows 7. I just want to be sure: Does Windows 7 Home Premium align any partition (primary, extended, logical) with the beginning of any 4K physical sector?? Or is there a risk that Win7 misaligns the partitions, resulting in a reduced performance? In case Disk Management in Win7 would align the newly created partitions correctly --- meaning at the beginning of any 4K physical sector --- then how can I verify that? Are there any Partition Alignment utilities or tools for that to check? Johan