DigiPlus

List of the contents of this article:

• 1, What does hard disk 4K alignment mean? What exactly should I do?
• 2, How to set up 4K alignment?
• 3、How to set up 4k alignment on the newly bought solid-state drive

What does hard disk 4K alignment mean? What exactly should I do?

1. Change the originally specified 512 bytes of each sector to 4096 bytes per sector, which is what is often called "4K sector" now. The so-called "4K alignment"That is, the formatted hard disk that conforms to the definition of "4K sector" and writes data according to the rules of 4K per sector.

2. "4K alignment" is to align the hard disk sector to an integer multiple of 8 analog sectors, that is, 512B*8=4096B, and 4096 bytes is 4K.

3. K alignment is a must for using SSD solid-state drive. Due to the characteristics of the read and write mechanism of SSD hard disk, when writing data, 8 sectors (4096KB) are used as a basic storage unit.

4. System alignment is automatically aligned when the system is formatted with win7 or above.

How to set up 4K alignment?

The famous diskgenius can also be used when repartitioning. As long as you check the integer multiple of the following sectors, and then select 8 or more sectors, you can achieve alignment.

Download the free partition assistant, install and run it. Take the following figure as an example. Select the E disk and right-click the mouse to select "Advanced Operation" - "Partition Alignment". After clicking "Partition Alignment", the dialog box in the figure below appears. Select 4K alignment and click OK.

Make a u boot USB flash drive and set 4k alignment 1 for the solid-state drive. First of all, we make a u-boot USB disk boot disk in advance, and then insert the USB boot disk into the computer usb interface. Press the boot shortcut key to enter the u boot main menu interface, and select to run the win8pe menu and press Enter 2 After entering the win8pe system, double-click to open diskgenius.

According to the default setting, it is 4K=4096 bytes of 4k alignment. The general sector size is 512 bytes. The number of sectors of any integer multiple of 8 in the 4096512=8 sector meets the requirements of 4K alignment. The default setting should be 2048 sectors, which meets the 4K alignment requirements In the early stage of disk development, 512 bytes per sector was more suitable at that time.

How to set up 4k alignment of the newly bought solid-state drive

WinWin8 or Win10's built-in disk management tool already has the solid-state drive 4K alignment function, just connect the SSD hard disk to In a Win7/8/10 computer, then right-click "Computer (This Computer)" on the desktop, and click "Manage" in the pop-up menu, as shown in the figure below.

Choose 4096, commonly known as 4k alignment. For new hard disks, we generally perform 4K alignment when partitioning the hard disk. For example, it can be easily done by using the DiskGenius hard disk partitioning tool.

4K alignment operation for solid-state drives, we can achieve it with the help of the partition assistant tool.As shown in the figure, in the main interface of its program, select the partition where the SSD solid-state drive is located, and take the USB flash drive as an example. Its operation process is similar to that of SSD.