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On busy servers and high end gaming machines there may be a slight performance gain from using the new partition alignments on traditional hard drives, but on the average working PC the difference would be minimal at best. The decision to use the new partition alignments may simply come down to whether or not your favored partitioning, imaging, backup or cloning tools are able to work to the new rules. If you wanted to continue using that older version of Ghost or TrueImage, or Partition Magic and Drive Image, then you would have to stick with the old partitioning standards. Using a pre-AF partition changing tool on a drive or partition that has been aligned to the new rules will normally by default revert it to the old alignment standards, which may cause you some issues. In the case of Partition Magic and Drive Image it is even more serious as neither can be used with most things Advanced Format. They will see new alignment partitions as having errors and will want to try and repair them, sometimes with disastrous results. see:- No More Magic

All current operating systems that have been optimized for Advanced Format are of course backwards compatible and will install and function quite happily on pre-AF hard drives and partitions. Most pre-AF imaging and cloning tools are actually perfectly capable of working with the latest generation of Windows operating systems and even Drive Image and Partition Magic can still function as intended with all versions of Windows on a traditional hard drive if that drive has been partitioned entirely to traditional alignments. As with the opposite scenario mentioned earlier it would be necessary to avoid letting an AF aware operating system create its own partition during install, or for you to use any of the bundled apps or tools that may re-align or create partitions to the new rules.

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If you need to correct the alignments of existing partitions to the new standards then you have a few options:-
    • Start over by deleting partitions and recreating them to the desired alignments, then reinstall and restore data.
    • Recreate partitions and restore an OS image with a tool that can do it without altering partition parameters.
    • Clone a partition and its contents to another location and then clone it back to a correctly aligned position;
    • Use one of the apps that were specifically developed to realign misplaced partitions.
We do not favor the realigning apps because moving the starting point of an existing partition can be a complex, risky and sometimes very lengthy operation if large amounts of data along with file tables and indexes, boot records and boot files, all have to be shunted forward on a drive. If you have a lightweight and non mission critical machine then this may be an easy fix you are willing to risk, but It would be foolhardy on a required working machine without having full backups of operating systems and data and the ability to rebuild a drive. One advantage for some people may be that these tools auto-correct for boot problems caused by a moved partition by updating the BCD (boot configuration data) store.

Our favored and recommended method of backing up a partition is to have a full and up-to-date clone of it on another hard drive, which means we are already more than half way towards the clone method of realigning partitions. The time this method takes is predictable from 30 to 60 seconds per gig of data and is much safer because if something goes wrong, such as a glitch or power outage, we still have our unaffected master clone with which to begin again.

One other but more extreme option would be to use a partitioning utility that has the ability to resize a partition from its front end, which can allow you to move the start of a partition forward a little bit on the drive, then move it back to an aligned position. Of course this is doubly risky and only suggested for people who like gambling. If the partitioning tool has the ability to work to both alignment standards then this method could also be used to restore traditional alignments to partitions that had been inadvertently created to the new rules, but again we would recommend the clone backup and restore method of repositioning a partition. Moving Partition Alignments with Gparted (off-site guide, relevant for HDDs).

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The introduction of Advanced Format was poorly highlighted and so in many quarters it went completely unnoticed. Not just normal people but admin staff and corporations were caught out and some are still incorrectly configuring AF hard drives. In an effort to smooth the transition to Advanced Format, or perhaps as a way to try and ease their conscience a little for slipping the whole thing in under the radar, a couple of drive manufacturers did develop a way to help make their AF hard drives cope with unaligned partitions.

Western Digital's Drive Jumper.
Western Digital equipped their first “EARS” range of AF drives with a hardware jumper that would force an unaligned partition into line. This only works for the first partition on the drive and so can only be used when the entire drive is one single partition. If at a later time you decide to create another partition the jumper has to be removed, which will wipe away the existing partition and all its contents. The folks over at TomsHardware.com don’t recommend using it and we also advise that you give it a miss and instead take the time to correctly align partitions.

Seagate's SmartAlign™
Seagate’s solution is more comprehensive and uses software in the hard drive’s controller to dynamically compensate for any mis-alignment of partitions. It means it is possible to continue using older utilities that set traditional partition alignments without suffering the resulting performance loss or possible data corruption. Indeed you can forget all about partition alignment and just let the hard drive’s controller deal with it. However, (there is always an however) it removes the need for any user intervention or even any knowledge about Advanced Format, which could lead to the use of various utilities that work to opposite alignment standards. As we mentioned earlier the mixing of partition alignments on a drive does not in itself seem to cause any issues, but the conflicts between opposing partitioning utilities can too often result in the loss or corruption of existing partitions. Advanced Format and Vanishing Partitions

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