It takes a long time though. My 400GByte partition (with over 200GByte of free space) on a SATA2 drive took about 8,5 hours to complete (with Minitool partition wizard).

-Shades (April 03, 2013, 08:26 AM)

This can't be true. I have alter size of drives on my 500GB HDD (even on my 1TB HDD), the process normally take about 2 hours.

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)

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.

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.

Reading and (mainly) writing to an aligned partition can increase the speed of your PC 5-10%. When checking numbers in Process Explorer you do notice that I/O drops (duh!) but also that you lose a lot less of resources on interrupts. Because of the drop in I/O you will also expand the longevity of your (SATA) hard disk as a bonus.

Best of all, with a free tool like 'Minitool partition wizard' you can do the alignment. There are a lot more Partition managers who offer the similar functionality. 'Minitool partition wizard' is just the software that I used for this.

Of course, when compared with an SSD it hardly makes a difference, but for the ones without the funds, alignment does make working just a bit longer with the 'old clunker' more bearable...and will leave more time to save for the real speed upgrade  ;)

-Shades (April 01, 2013, 05:27 PM)

As far as I know, the alignment matter is as important in the case of SSD. Misalignment can happen when one does not prepare the SSD with Windows itself during setup. That was exactly my case in the past when I transfer my Windows (originally install on a HDD) via Ghost image to SSD.

Btw, I use MiniTool Partition Wizard Home Edition to help me align my SSD (after transfer) and AS SSD Benchmark to verify whether my SSD is aligned correctly.