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I bought an SSD and I want to have my partitions aligned to 2048KB for better performance. I'm wondering, is it possible to realign the partitions without losing data? Is there some program that does this?

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5 Answers

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The following are good and free partition managers.
However, it's unknown whether they will see your SSD, so you'll need to try:

EASEUS Partition Master (Home Edition)
Partition Manager 10 Express
Parted Magic

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Regardless of SSD, do they allow to realign partitions without losing data? – Ram Rachum Nov 5 '09 at 14:22
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All of them move partitions without losing data (unless you make a mistake). I would suggest making a backup before. – harrymc Nov 5 '09 at 14:30
I would second the suggestion to backup – Josh Nov 5 '09 at 14:48
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Backup I will. But I asked specifically about realigning, not moving. Can they realign without data loss? – Ram Rachum Nov 5 '09 at 14:50
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There seems to be some misunderstanding here. You can't realign a misaligned partition without moving it. In any case, how do you know they are misaligned? – harrymc Nov 5 '09 at 15:06
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The problem with what you are trying is that the partitions both need to begin and end on a multiple of 2048kb, which is easy with any partition tool (partition magic, or gparted) and the allocation unit size, which is set when the partition is formatted, while their is data in place.

So pretty much no. To align the partition you can do without reformatting, but to reset the allocation unit size you need to reformat.

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I've done this several times with GParted on regular hard drives. The warnings were always defrag first (I honestly don't know if you can do that), then best of luck and no guarantees. I never had a problem, but I was always aware I might. If you have data you want to keep it's best to just make a backup, try repartitioning, then you can test to see if your data is intact. If not you have a backup to begin rebuilding with.

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This article describes a way to solve aligning ssd with an existing partition using gparted

http://en.dogeno.us/2010/01/use-gparted-to-align-partitions-on-a-ssd-hard-drive-for-better-performance/

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Welcome to Super User! It would be nice to include the essential parts of the answer here, and provide the link only for future reference. – slhck♦ Aug 23 '11 at 19:38
up vote -1 down vote accepted

It seems the answer is simply NO.

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How would you align them with losing data anyway? – Bender Nov 5 '09 at 23:12
This answer is actually incorrect. You should still backup your files, but as numerous other people have pointed out, you can use gparted or even a specialized tool such as Paragon's alignment tool (paragon-software.com/home/partition-alignment/index.html) to physically shift the partitions without losing your data. – rob May 13 '12 at 5:48

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