Yes, using the Win7 boot media usually works fine. It usually creates NTFS partitions that are aligned to 4K boundaries.
(In contrast to Win XP's boot media, which starts NTFS at sector 63..)
Also useful:
Paragon Partition Alignment Tool & Windows98 FAT32 partition
Paragon Partition Alignment Tool & Windows98 FAT32 partition
Using SSD on XP SP2 system
Using SSD on XP SP2 system
gparted since 0.9.0 removed support for FAT16 and FAt32!
https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/46 … FAT16-and-FAt32
Benchmarks: HDD vs. CF vs. true SSD on Tualatin rig
Re: Benchmarks: HDD vs. CF vs. true SSD on Tualatin rig
Windows MBR and Advanced Format Drives (e512)
https://digital-forensics.sans.org/blog/2010/ … mat-drives-e512
How to kill CF cards ?
https://www.pcengines.ch/cfwear.htm
Roman78 wrote:Disable File indexing, System Restore and the Pagefile
"Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?
Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.
In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that
Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.
In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns,
there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD."
Source: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/e7/2009/05/0 … d-state-drives/
Last, but not least, there is an performance issue with FAT32, as mentioned in one of the links above.
[..] clusters in a Fat32 volume can be aligned at will, it improves speed, and alignment is more difficult than with Ntfs because the Fat's bizarre size shifts the clusters.
Which means that it isn't enough to align a FAT32 partition itself (or the whole volume), but it's also necessary to align its clusters accordingly.
FAT12/FAT16 may or may not be affected..
FAT-32 is different from FAR-12/16 in that the root directory may be anywhere, and grow as needed.
Please also note that these issues are not only restricted to SSDs.
HDDs since ~2008 or so do use 4K sectoring (socalled Advanced Format, AF).
While they do accept 512Bytes per Sector externally, they nolonger use them internally.
If you're using a stone age OS like Win98 on it, a read-modify-write will occur, reducing performance by ~50%.
Unless you're fixing the alignment issue or running Windows XP on an early HDD with the Sector 64 hack.
On Western Digital HDDs, that's the "WD Align" jumper switch (pins 7-8).
Edit: Small corrections.
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