Clone Windows 7 onto SSD?

For SSDs I gather the recommended offset is 128 sectors. Does it make a difference if the offset of the first partition is a multiple of 128? For example 256, 384, 2048? What about if you are dual booting and the second OS has a partition offset of 25,600,000? This is a multiple of 128.

Is there a performance difference between a first and a second OS on a SSD?

 

I have not tried this, but from what is known about SSDs, there should be no performance difference between multiples of the offset of a validly aligned partition. With SSDs, due to the complete abstraction between file system and physical data layout on the drive, there should also be no difference in speed based upon the partition order.

The difficulty in defining what's the right minimum offset for a specific SSD brand/model, is that the internal structure is typically proprietary information and not released to the public (i.e. block/page size, caching algorythm, write back strategy etc.). Assuming a 4k size page and a 512k block (and not factoring in caching), any multiple of 4k would be a valid alignment.

Current tips & recommendations are not based on information (because its unknown), but on testing from the community, so take all that with a pich of salt.

 

Thanks. That confirms what I suspected.

Good news for Josh358 as he could restore an image of his cylinder-aligned Win7 partition to a SSD as a 2048 sector-aligned partition using the method I described. The software has a one month trial so it is OK for this once only usage.

 

You can mix cylinder-aligned and 2048 sector-aligned partitions on the same HD. Dell do this with their Vista OS computers. The first partition is cylinder-aligned. The rest are 2048 sector-aligned.

 

Thanks, that's a great idea, though I'm thinking at this point that with RTM a month away, I'll probably wait and do a low level format/diskpar/clean install.