alexanrs wrote:

Some partitioning tools have the option to take care of the aligning for you. You'll have better luck partitioning it with a recent Linux live CD than with Windows 2000 or 98 partitioning tools

I used GParted on a Linux LiveCD, which aligns partitions to 1MB by default. I'd rather have some more control over this though, and with most partitioning utilities you can't really tell what you're doing exactly. Does anyone know of a partitioning tool where you can specify the exact sector/LBA offset and length for each partition?

I have some (new) CF cards on order, once they arrive I'll copy my files over to those so I can experiment some more with partition alignment on the SSDs, and see if there's some way to "reset" them without doing the Secure Erase thing. I'm thinking maybe filling them up with either 00 or FF bytes would be enough to make the controller mark all blocks as "erased".

I'm pretty sure you can do that with parted itself. GParted is just a frontend to make partitioning easier, so it probably doesn't expose all the options available from parted.