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Registry cleaning software debunked...

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tslim:
With regard to alignment when recovering images.
Older versions of both Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image worked the same way, if the partition was aligned when you made the image it usually restored that way, if it was not it didn't.
-pilgrim-online (April 02, 2013, 10:22 AM)
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I can't be sure about the above claim because:

1. How an image is created matters. Norton Ghost creates image very differently with different parameters/settings. i.e. disk imaging utility normally won't create byte by byte image unless you specify so.

2. One might restore an image to a new HDD with different capacity. (bigger or smaller or even to SSD).

If a disk utility like Ghost restores an image to a HDD and manage to create all partitions with correct alignment, to me, that simply means the utility knows and have done its part in making sure alignment is right. i.e. it has nothing to do with whether the original HDD (where the image is based on) has all its partitions aligned.

Tinman57:
ERUNT for registry backup is an excellent suggestion. More people should take that to heart. If you really want to speed up your XP/2003 PC, check for partition alignment. Chances are that the partitions on your hard disk aren't. I did do this alignment on my XP PC and it does make a noticeable difference. -Shades (April 01, 2013, 05:27 PM)
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  I've owned a PC since W95, and the only time I have ever heard about "Alignments" was with the old C64 drives that had head alignment problems over time.  So what exactly is this alignment that you speak of?

f0dder:
Alignment of HDD matters regardless of the sector size, the bigger the HDD capacity the worse (in term of performance) if a partition is misaligned. I remember I read an article discussing this issue.-tslim (April 01, 2013, 08:49 PM)
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Got a link to something backing this up? I can't off top of my head think of a technical reason this would be a problem - the smallest unit a HDD can address is a sector, and as long as your requests are sector-aligned you should be going full speed; I've never seen partitions that weren't at least 512-byte aligned (probably because the old-style partition table entries addresses in units of 512 bytes? 8) ).

I've owned a PC since W95, and the only time I have ever heard about "Alignments" was with the old C64 drives that had head alignment problems over time.  So what exactly is this alignment that you speak of?-Tinman57 (April 02, 2013, 07:52 PM)
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Up until a few years ago, a sector was 512 bytes - "lots of people" used to hardcode this number when dealing with raw disk access. Then came SSDs and a bit later we got harddrives with 4k sectors. While the tech and reasons are different between the two, both share the same performance property: if you don't access the the drives native block size, performance suffers badly. Reads are bad enough, but consider what happens if your OS tries to write a misaligned 512-byte data block that crosses two 4096-byte drive blocks? The drive needs to read in those two blocks (8k), merge in the modified 512 bytes, and write back those 8k again. Instead of issuing a single aligned 4k block. Ouch.

It's even worse with SSDs - their read/write addressable blocks are large (typically 4k or 8k, I believe?), but then there's the "erase block size" as well - probably in the range of 256k or 512k.

SKA:
Sorry for dumb q :

Can Min Partition Wizard Home edition be used to align partitions on a disk with XP installed already ? Or align partitions must be done BEFORE install OS/Programs etc ?

Thanks/Ska

Curt:
@SKA, you can create partitions "forever", as long as you still have space for it.
But what your said program can do, I don't know.

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