Method for partition of SSD solid state hard disk

If you are using or preparing to buy SSD, you will certainly have some understanding of it. Now because the structure of solid-state hard disk and mechanical hard drive are fundamentally different, solid-state drives to achieve real performance needs of the trim instructions and other special means.

But most people do not know, or are not aware of, in addition to some newer solid-state hard drives, partitioning and formatting for solid-state drives also have a very important impact.

If you simply partition and format a solid-state drive with XP or some other older tool, you can get only a fraction of the performance!

Note: Intel's solid-state drives automatically compensate for this problem at the controller level, so if you are using an Intel SSD, you can skip the article introduced by the System house.

I. Root causes of the problem

The root cause of the problem is from the solid-state hard drive component of the Flash.

The majority of the current Flash memory organization structure is divided into a number of 512KB blocks (block), and each block is a lot of 4KB in units (page) composition.

It is as if the administrative organization of our country is divided into many provinces, each province is divided into many cities.

The working principle of flash memory determines that its erasure operation is in blocks (block), while the write operation is the smallest unit of page.

This site's solid-state hard disk technology topics can let you know more about solid-state drives and flash memory.

On the other hand, our operating system also has a minimum allocation unit when managing the hard disk.

The default minimum allocation unit of NTFS is exactly the same size as 4KB, which is good.

The problem, however, is that partitioning does not usually start from scratch, but has an offset value.

For example, using the Windows XP partitioning tool, this offset value will let the partition start in the middle of the page.

That is, the minimum allocation unit of the operating system and the page of the SSD drive are misplaced.

As a result, the operating system writes one 4KB of data at a time and writes two times in the actual operation.

Ideally, each of the smallest allocation units of the operating system would correspond to a single page of the Flash memory, so that the operating system could write a 4KB of data each time, requiring only a single actual write operation to complete.

The performance gap between the two can be up to twice times the maximum!

If the partition is not aligned, and the format is not using 4KB as the minimum allocation unit, the performance loss may be greater.

In the foreign famous website AnandTech test, to a top solid state hard disk use FAT to format words, and partition is also not aligned, the result 4KB file write performance is extremely bad.

With the alignment partition and the 4KB minimum allocation unit, the write performance of 4KB files is almost 10 times times higher than before!

Two. Partitioning and formatting correctly

The solution to this problem is simply to use the Windows7 partitioning tool to partition your solid-state drive, and then use 4KB (4096B) as the allocation unit size when formatting.

Microsoft has long recognized that solid-state drives require good operating system support, so it adds trim instructions and partition alignment to the WINDOWS7 to optimize for solid-state drives.

With solid-state drives, Windows7 is the best operating system option at the moment.

But what if there is no Windows7? Under XP and Vista, of course there is a way, and it's not complicated.

Of course, this involves repartition, so if you have data in your SSD, it will all be lost, so you need to do a backup.

In addition, you need to prepare a computer that has a system installed.

Of course, this is very simple, first put the system on another hard drive, most of the use of solid state drive friends should have more than one hard drive it?

This can be done through a free tool software Diskpar.exe, which you can download via Microsoft's official website to connect solid-state drives to this PC, and then into Control Panel, in management tools-> Computer Management-> Disk Management, Find out what disk is currently on your solid state drive.

For example, if your computer currently has two hard drives, the solid-state drive may be 1th. Write down this number.

In addition, all partitions are deleted, please back up the data before doing so.

At the beginning of the-> run, type cmd. In the pop-up command line window, come to the folder where you placed Diskpar.exe.

First you can use DiskPar to determine if the number is correct.

Type Diskpar-i 1.

(Note: This 1 should be entered according to the values you saw earlier.) ), DiskPar will output information similar to the following after a carriage return:

----Drive 1 Geometry infomation----

Cylinders = 4139

Trackspercylinder = 240

Sectorspertrack = 63

BytesPerSector = 512

DiskSize = 32041820160 (Bytes) = 30557 (MB)

The last line shows the size of the hard disk, for example, 30557 (MB) is a 30G hard drive.

If your results are calculated and the size of your hard disk is different, please confirm the hard drive number in the Control Panel again.

If you can't confirm your hard drive, it's best to stop, or you might erase data from other hard drives on your computer.

Type Diskpar-s 1, which appears as follows:

Set partition can only do on a raw drive.

can use Disk Manager to delete all existing partitions

Are you sure drive 1 are a raw device without any partition? (y/n)

Please confirm that you have previously deleted all partitions on this solid-state drive and press Y.

----Drive 1 Geometry infomation----cylinders = 4139

Trackspercylinder = 240

Sectorspertrack = 63

BytesPerSector = 512

DiskSize = 32041820160 (Bytes) = 30557 (MB)

We are going to set the new disk partition.

All data on this drive would be lost. Continue (y/n)?

DiskPar will display the hard drive information, warning that all data on the hard drive will be lost, press Y again.

Please specify starting offset (in sectors):

Here allows you to set the offset value mentioned earlier, enter 128, and return.

Please specify partition length (in MB) (Max = 30557):

This allows you to specify the partition size, if you are divided into one area, directly enter the capacity of the hard disk.

Done setting partition.

----New Partition Information----

Statringoffset = 65536

Partitionlength = 32041304064

hiddensectors = 128

PartitionNumber = 1

Partitiontype = 7

You are should use Disk Manager to format this partition

Here, the partitions are done! You only need to go to the disk Management in the control Panel mentioned earlier to format the partitions. Remember to allocate unit size selection 4096!

Three. Verify

If your solid state drive has been in use for some time, just want to know is not aligned, or you follow the above methods to operate, but not enough to ease the process, afraid of what wrong, there is a simple way to let you verify that your solid state drive partition is not aligned.

In the start-> run, type Msinfo32.

After you enter the window of a system information, select the component-> Storage-> disk, here will list all the hard disk information on your computer.

Locate the SSD and see that the value of its partition start offset is 4096 integer times.

If not, the performance of your solid-state drive has a lot of room for improvement Oh!

Through the introduction of this article, I believe you have mastered SSD solid state hard disk partition use method.