Aligning Dynamic Disks in Windows for better Performance

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Disk Alignment has become very important for Windows Administrators, as this improves the performance and improves the I/O File storage and Database servers. In windows 2008 above a 1MB offset has been introduced by Microsoft, where all disk of the disk properly aligned in the back-end of the storage. Aligning Dynamic Disks   is fixed in Windows. new dynamic disks don’t have the 1MB offset at the front of the drive. If the drive uses the MBR partition, the offset will be 31KB. If the drive uses the GPT partition style, the offset will be 17KB.

Aligning Dynamic Disks in Windows

You add a new disk to Windows server and convert it to a dynamic disk .  create the simple volume on the drive.

  1. Right-click on the Start button and click either “Command Prompt (Admin)” or “Windows PowerShell (Admin)” depending on how your profile is set.
  2. Type disk part and press Enter.
  3. Type list disk and press Enter.
  4. Select the new disk
  5. List partitions

will see something like:

OR

WARNING: This will erase the drive. These instructions are ONLY intended to be run a new drive with no data upon it.

Start off with disk part and select the appropriate drive:

Convert the drive to GPT and fix the default reserved partitions to what it should be:

This creates the reserved partition correctly with the 1MB offset. convert the drive to dynamic and create your already aligned volume:

This will create a simple volume on the disk with correct alignment.

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