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When I create partitions on a new SSD using Windows XP64 SP2, are they properly aligned?

The answer for XP was NO, so I'm having another question: How about (up to date) Ubuntu? According to ubuntuforums the answer seems to be YES using diskpar. Could anybody kindly confirm?

The long story:

I know, there may be problems with partitions on SSD because of misalignment. I've found many articles about it, e.g., this one: and descriptions how to fix it. However, it all includes downloading some software, and it's probably unnecessary.

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migrated from serverfault.com Jan 25 '11 at 18:38

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2 Answers

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Short answer: under XP 'no' - it's not using a modern partitioning scheme. The answer under Vista/7 is 'yes'.

Long answer: actually aligning it properly can be a pain depending on what software you have available - some of the stuff linked in that thread and on that forum is good. The simplest thing to do is make the partitions under an OS that does them properly, then move the drive and install. There are some apps that will do it in-place for existing partitions - I've had luck with Paragon's product.

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Thank you, I hoped that there's an update for Windows taking care of it. It isn't... no comment, I could start a nice rant now, but you can imagine what I mean, can't you? I hope the current Ubuntu does it right... – maaartinus Jan 25 '11 at 19:14
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@maaartinus - I'm not a Linux guy so I can't speak for Ubuntu specifically but I believe any Linux distro using a current kernel and standard utilities should be doing it correctly by default at this point. – Shinrai Jan 25 '11 at 21:19
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Apparently the utilities bundled with the latest releases of Ubuntu do it correctly, but you can still force it if you're paranoid by doing fdisk -H 224 -S 56 /dev/sdX.

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I'm not paranoid, at least not that much. I just didn't trust a single answer by somebody somewhere. – maaartinus Jan 25 '11 at 19:26
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It's more that I'm paranoid about it than you ;) I had the same problem, it seems that Ubuntu does do it correctly, as can be seen when examining the disk with fdisk afterwards. – Matthieu Cartier Jan 25 '11 at 19:28
How do you recognize it? I know fdisk, but can't tell what's right. – maaartinus Jan 25 '11 at 21:40
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