[ale] If you own (almost) ANY HDD, repartition with 4k boundaries

[Justin Goldberg]

Thanks to everyone on ALE for all their help.

I ended up buying a 500GB WD drive. I ran the 'WD Align' tool (which
apparently a pared down version of an unknown Acronis program) with the new
drive connected to a usb adapter, and it moved the beginning of the
partition at 126,976, which is 4096 times 31. I'm not sure of exact
significance of the this number, though, as this partition ends at about
403GB, but this tool shows it ends at position 846,544,895. I wish I knew
what this tool is actually doing, so that I could format and clone the new
drive myself in Gparted.

If anyone gets a new drive and you use a tool from the manufacturer that
aligns your partitions (Seagate smartalign or WD Align), I'd recommend
creating a very small partition at the start of the drive, use the tool to
align the partition, and then resize with Gparted, since the end of the
partition doesn't matter, imho (except when reading/writing data in the 4KB
not aligned at the end of the partition). I imaged the drive with Acronis
True Image and later ran the align tool, which took a few hours to move
120GB of data.

Offtopic, but will there be an ALE branded ale? That would be cool.


On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 1:04 PM, David Ritchie <deritchie at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 12:08 AM, Justin Goldberg <justgold79 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Thanks for the info Matt and Ron.
>>
>> Grrrrrr, planned obsolescence.
>>
>> I guess fat32 wouldn't make any difference.
>>
> Repeat after me: Windows XP is an obsolete, unsupported software system.
> Same can be said about a lot of previous versions of Linux versions,
> which would likely not work well with newer hardware either. Not so much
> 'planned obsolescence' as it is a moving target....
>
> FAT32 would make no difference, as it is at a higher level in the software
> stack in any case...
>
> -- Dave Ritchie
>
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