Paragon Partition Alignment Tool White Paper and Free License

An article by Bharat Balegere    No Comments  Last Modified on June 3, 2010

Paragon has published a white paper :”Partition Alignment Dramatically Increases System Performance”.This white paper describes all major issues regarding partitions misalignment on 4K hard disk drives, solid state drives, RAID, SAN and in virtual environments. Also in the white paper is considered the reasons why partitions become misaligned and the consequential disadvantages.

You can learn more about Partition Alignment by registering here http://www.paragon-software.com/landing-pages/WhitePapers/paragon_alignment_tool.html

Once you have registered with Paragon, you will receive a confirmation email containing the White Paper download link. Besides the download link for the white paper, Paragon Software also offers users to download Paragon Alignment Tool 2.0 Special Edition (Version 32 Bit and 64 Bit) together with the product key and serial number.This offer is valid only till June 30.I would recommend everybody to read the white paper.It is extremely easy to understand and has only 10 pages which you can easily read.

Paragon Partition Alignment Tool corrects the misalignment of partitions increasing the performance of your Hard Disk.Misalignment of logical partition sectors and actual physical sectors leads to redundant read/write operations, which is critical for overall performance, and with SSD, for its lifespan as well. Paragon Alignment Tool will help you align partitions on physical and virtual disks according to internal device’s geometry without affecting the on-disk data.

Features of Partition Alignment Tool

• The only tool that alligns partitions in a single operation
• Guarantees safety for the on-disk system and data
• Boosts performance of disk subsystems up to 3 times
• Significantly increases endurance of SSD drives
• Aligns partitions inside virtual containers and the host
• Aligns partitions on ultra high-capacity 4K hard disks

I installed Partition Alignment Tool in Windows XP( I triple boot Windows XP ,Windows 7 and Linux Mint.)

Initially all my partitions were unaligned.First I aligned my Windows 7 partition.It took about 10 minutes to  complete the operation.When I booted into Windows 7 I could not see any noticeable performance increase.As you can see in this screenshot Linux Ext4 Partitions are not supported.

Then I tried aligning my Windows XP Partition from within Windows XP.The program required a restart to complete the operation.On restart the alignment process started and took about 11 minutes 53 seconds to complete.This is the pic I took with my digicam while the alignment process was going on.

I bench marked my Hard Disk Partitions before and after partition alignment using CrystalDiskMark.There was hardly any change in the read and write speeds.This tool definitely did not drastically improve the performance of my home computer.However I am sure that this tool will increase performance in SSDs ,RAID and Virtualized Environments.