Hi,
I haven't started using SSD technology, but am interested in knowing if there is anything concrete on the issue of RDeploy and SSD partition alignment.
My ignorance aside I do though doubt whether RDeploy will,
- on-the-fly ammend the partitioning for SSD drives for the optimum offset
- when deploying one SSD image to another SSD drive whether any previous non-standard alignment will be preserved
The issue revolves around the standard partitioning rules being that partitions must start and stop on cylinder boundaries. The result is that historically the first partition started at the beginning of the 64th sector. The problem is that with SSD technology, this is smack in the middle of an SSD page, which can result in a 50% performance hit (and some people have reported even worse drive degradations). Not understanding this offset has probably been the cause of much bad press for SSD performance.
In short then, for SSD technology, partitions should start at the 128th sector -a whole SSD page into the drive. This will result in 'optimised' performance.
Microsoft recommends an offset of 2048 for the the primary partition on Windows 2003 Servers, as this accommodates most RAID strip unit sizes, and would also of course be nice for SSD too. I'm not sure if this implemented as standard in Windows 7 -must check....
Kind Regards,
Ian./