topic Disk Alignment - Windows volumes in StoreVirtual Storage

Disk Alignment - Windows volumes

Jim Ruzauskas — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 21:27:04 GMT

I'm trying to find some documentation on this relating to my P4300 SAN with storage assigned to Windows 2003 and 2008 / R2 servers.

Is it a best practice item to re-align the disk, and by how much? I could've sworn there was a document referencing this, but I can't seem to find it now. Thanks!

Re: Disk Alignment - Windows volumes

Steve Burkett — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 21:48:28 GMT

Have a look at Chapter 6 in the doc 'Best Practices for Enabling Microsoft Windows with SAN/iQ' in the HP downloads section:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/DocumentIndex.jsp?contentType=SupportManual〈=en&cc=us&docIndexId=64179&taskId=120&prodTypeId=18964&prodSeriesId=3936556

For best results, you align for 64K.

You don't need to do this alignment for 2008/R2 as Windows does this automatically now. Woo!

Re: Disk Alignment - Windows volumes

Jim Ruzauskas — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 21:51:14 GMT

That's the one, must've overlooked it in the sea of documents. Thanks!

Re: Disk Alignment - Windows volumes

Uwe Zessin — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 08:08:07 GMT

And if you want to verify whether a partition is aligned -- don't use DISKPART LIST PARTITION, because it does show rounded values.

Use:
C:\> wmic partition get BlockSize, Name, StartingOffset

Re: Disk Alignment - Windows volumes

Jim Ruzauskas — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 12:49:01 GMT

Good tip, I'll give that a try too.

Re: Disk Alignment - Windows volumes

Steve McGee — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 13:43:43 GMT

What should you look for in the results of that command? that the starting offset be divisible by 64?