Acronis True Image destroying alignment information? Useless for SSD / RAID use ?

From what I read here, Acronis True image ("ATI") does not preserve any offset/alignment settings when restoring single partitions.

If this is *really* true, this would mean that:

1) ATI should not be used to restore partitions on any RAID arrays, as this would cause severe performance degradation
2) ATI should not be used to restore partitions on SSDs for the same reasons

Background:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jimmymay/archive/2009/05/08/disk-partition-alignment-sector-alignment-make-the-case-with-this-template.aspx

ATI seems to not respect any alignment/offset information when restoring single partitions. In this case, it defaults to the (misaligned) 63 sector / 31.5KB default that was standard with Win XP/2000. Microsoft has already stated that this is not optimal whe using any RAID arrays (and for similar reasons, this is also true when using today's SSDs with very few execptions):

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929491

What is even worse than using a 10 year old offset default in a 2009 product, is that there seems to be no way to change the alignment parameters when using ATI. Both Windows Vista and the upcoming Win7 use a 1024k offset, which will be destroyed when using ATI on a single partition of a multi-partition disk (such as the system partition on a multi-partition disk).

This makes ATI completely useless in any usage scenario that involves any RAID arrays or SSDs outside of full disk (all partitions) imaging/restore.

Does anyone here have insight whether Acronis will fix this anytime soon? Otherwise, I'm in the market for some 21 century imaging software that works on modern systems - any suggestions ?

Thanks,

Qwertz

 

Here's a workaround for SSD's that works for me:
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=54509

 

I scrapped ATI for this exact reason! I have 2 hard disks in my laptop, configured as RAID0. When I used ATI to restore...what a disaster!

I took an image of the entire disk; therefore, when I restored, I wanted to restore the entire disk, as it was when the backup was performed. First of all, I just couldn't simplly indicate to restore the entire disk; rather, I had to "select a destination" for each partition. But once a destination disk has been selected, it can't be selected again in the same restore session.

So now that leaves me to restoring one partition at a time. When it restores partitions, it is not restoring them to the size of the partition as it was backed up. Yeah, they do offer options of increasing/descreasing the size before you proceed with the restore; however, with my RAID0 congifuration, the max size of the partition that ATI calculated was totally wrong and WAY smaller.

Ridiculous and unacceptable. Clearly, this software should not be used with RAID configurations. So, for me, into the trash!

I've used ATI in the past, on a single-disk laptop and it performed flawlessly.

 

Wow...I wished I had known this when I was writing my review of this.

I've messed with Acronis True Image v9 (my own retail purchase) as well as the trial version of Acronis True Image Home 2009.

I'm currently exploring whether or not this impacts general performance for 'regular' users. The only problem I can see (potentially) is if read/write times are decreased when the alignment is screwed, I'm testing installs of Vista before and after a restore with HDTune v2.55 to see if there is a difference.

Anyone have any information about this?

 

I tried this and it worked for me:

0. back up your current hard drive, please, just in case

1. delete ssd partition through disk manager and align partition using diskpar

2. fast format the partition on the ssd and set as active through disk manager

3. in a first step, restore only the mbr and track 0 from the acronis image to the ssd

4. in a second step, restore acronis image as specified files or folders to A NEW LOCATION (NOT THE ORIGINAL !!! See step 0 for prevention), which will be the ssd

5. reboot if asked

6. ultimately, plug your ssd as boot drive

7. verify ssd is still aligned using diskpar