1 Topic by xhlr

  • xhlr
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  • Registered: 2014-02-22
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Topic: Misalignment by default - remedy is from 1MB-> 2MB -> 1MB?

First of all thanks to the creator, makers and sustainers of GParted. Been using it for a while now, can't think of any other tool for partitioning.

So I tried to explain the importance of partition alignment to a friend of mine, and sent him the first link to a LifeHacker-article I Bing-ed (Google, what? wink). He then replied with a certain flaw in GParted according to that same article, which I could not believe as GParted is just a flawless program cool. After checking the link myself, I read the part he referred to and was quite surprised:

Start up Gparted and find your SSD in the upper-right dropdown menu. Select it, and click on your first partition in the menu. Hit the Resize/Move button in the toolbar. Change the "Free Space Preceding" box to 2MB, uncheck "Round to Cylinders", and hit "Resize/Move". (If you're using a newer live CD, check the "MiB" box). Hit Apply once and let it do its thing.
Now hit Resize/Move again, and change the "Free Space Preceding" box to 1MB. Uncheck "Round to Cylinders" again, hit Resize/Move, then click Apply. Now your drive will be aligned to exactly 2048 blocks after the beginning of the disk, which allows for optimal SSD performance. Note that if you have multiple partitions on your SSD, you'll need to repeat this process for each partition, not just the first one on the disk.
Yes, moving it 2MB away then moving it back 1MB seems like a long, roundabout method, but Gparted measures space in a weird way. When you first start up Gparted, your partition will have less than 1MB of space preceding it, but Gparted will only measure it as 0-meaning if you align it to 1MB right off the bat, it'll keep the drive annoyingly misaligned at 1.03MB. If you set it to 2MB, hit Apply, and then move it back to 1MB, it works fine.

I haven't found anything related to this on this forum yet, however it could be a known issue under a different topic name. Otherwise, I could just be referring to something that has already been solved waaaay back in an earlier release of GParted. Does it hold any truth nowadays?

2 Reply by gedakc

  • gedakc
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Re: Misalignment by default - remedy is from 1MB-> 2MB -> 1MB?

Thank you for the words of appreciation.  It is good to hear that GParted has proven useful to you.  :-)

The steps described seem to indicate an older version of GParted because the option for alignment has been a drop-down list for quite some time, and not a checkbox.

Having said that, there is truth in that to change a partition at the start of the disk from Cylinder alignment to MiB alignment and have it start at the first MiB does indeed require two moves.

There are historical reasons for the current behaviour in which resizing GParted could change a resize into a move and resize operation. For more information see the following bug report:

Bug 635113 - Unable to change alignment from cylinder (63) to MiB (2048) in single step