Bensam123 wrote:That's about right as far as performance goes. TR has benchmarks on the drive which are pretty close. Realigining partitions is a waste of time and I doubt would offer any notable performance increases.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/22401/4
An un-aligned partition can cause all IO to double.
eg
blocks on HD
Block 0 Block 1
0-4095 4096-8191
If your partition is unaligned, doing a read operation to logical block 0 might start at 2048 and end at 6142. So when the OS tries to read in one block, the hard-drive needs to read in two blocks. This will happen for EVERY read.
Same thing for writes. So when the OS writes a 4k logical block to the HD, two physical blocks will need to be changed. This will cause write amplification and wear out the SSD faster.
I know about this kind of stuff because when setting up SAN devices, unaligned blocks can cause quite large performance degradations because iSCSI uses 64K reads/writes and SAN devices are typically shared.
A local SSD has the benefit of much lower latency and a non-shared devices, but the same basic issues apply.