Solid State Hard Drive 4k alignment what does that mean?

Solid-state hard disk because many friends have never used, coupled with a lack of comprehensive understanding, so the late use of solid-state hard disk will often encounter much more confusing things, such as a net friend asked the SSD 4k what does it mean?

4K meaning, simple is that partition time by 4K size to allocate each small module, such a hard disk is assigned to n more than 4K small partition, the purpose is to improve the reading efficiency of SSD. 4K-aligned hard drive, read write efficiency is the highest, which is what everyone said SSD needs 4K alignment thing. If not aligned, it causes the speed of reading or writing data to be erratic, and its speed advantage is not fully reflected.

The vast majority of mechanical hard disks default to 512-byte sectors, using DRAM as a storage medium, while mechanical hard drives, both SLC particles and MLC particles, belong to NAND flash memory storage units. This kind of hard disk sector is 4K, this is the origin of 4K, the same use of similar flash particles of SSD solid-state hard drive also with this situation!

In fact, about hard disk 4K alignment is mentioned in traditional mechanical hard disk, and 4K alignment is related to hard disk partition. This basic hard drive common sense in the mechanical hard drive and solid state hard drive, is not only for SSD solid-state hard disk only 4K to Zi Yi said, alignment can be said to all storage products are influential, such as USB flash drives and SD memory card.

Solid state hard disk alignment and misalignment in fact, the gap is very large, the following is a brand of solid-state hard disk 4K alignment and alignment of the read and storage data speed contrast.

The read-write speed of solid state hard drive before 4K alignment

Read and write speed of solid state hard drive 4K aligned

Now Microsoft in the WIN7 and 2008 R2 system has added trim instructions and partition alignment for solid-state drive optimization, so using the Win7 system for SSD partitions can automatically align 4K, in addition, we can use the most common hard disk partitioning tool Diskgen software ( At least 3.7 version above) to the solid state hard drive 4K alignment, as shown in the following figure, only need to check the alignment item can be selected.

4K alignment of solid-state hard disk partitions using the Diskgen hard disk partitioning tool

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