For SSD solid state drives need to align 4K, this has become a consensus, and for mechanical hard drives, many people should think: is not SSD, what 4K? Does the mechanical hard disk need to be aligned to 4K? The following test to verify whether the mechanical hard disk alignment 4K can improve performance. Speaking of mechanical hard disk alignment 4K, the first thing you can not say about advanced formatting, in general, the hard disk shipped after 2011, basically support advanced formatting. Advanced formatting definition: Advanced Format is also called "advanced formatting". The hard disk industry is currently undergoing a revolution in the way the sector is stored, replacing 512 bytes from the sector by storing 4096 bytes per sector. As the latest terminology, “Advanced Formatting” will better optimize single-disk density, which increases storage space. It uses the latest firmware to better adapt to the latest operating systems and other supporting facilities. For a long time, when a hard disk is stored, the mechanical hard disk is always read and written in units of 512-byte sectors. As the capacity of hard drives continues to increase, this ancient allocation standard has become increasingly out of date. As a result, the hard drive industry has decided to expand the sector capacity to 4KB, a technique known as “Advanced Format. In the conventional sector partitioning mechanism, a Sync/DAM area and an ECC error check area are required between every 512 bytes of data. In the "advanced format" mode, every 4KB is a sector, which is equivalent to combining the previous 8 sectors into one. Only one synchronization/separation area and one ECC check area with a slightly larger capacity are needed. . Start the formal test, the following is the test directory: First, the HD Tune read test because the HD Tune test write needs to re-deleted the format partition, will affect the 4K alignment, so this test only tests the read part 1, the following picture is Writes in non-4K aligned state 2. The following figure shows writes in 4K aligned state. Summary: The following figure is a comparison of HD Tune read tests (for easy viewing, the access time is multiplied by 10) See, in this test, whether or not to align 4K has basically no effect. Second, ATTO read and write test 1, the following figure is written in non-4K alignment state 2, the following figure is written in 4K alignment state 3, summary: through the following two read and write histograms, you can Clearly, in terms of reading, 4K alignment has a more stable advantage, and the write advantage is greater, so in this test, 4K alignment has a significant improvement on the hard disk (the larger the value, the better) Third, the large file and scattered small file copy test 1, the following two pictures for different hard disk small file copy test 2, the following two pictures for the same small hard disk copy test 3, the following two pictures are different Large file copy test under hard disk 4, the following two pictures are the same file copy test under the same hard disk. 5. Summary: In the aspect of copying files, test the scattered small files and large files under the same hard disk and different hard disks respectively (large file) For 2 ISO game images, 10266MB size, scattered small files are 1963 files of no more than 2M, a total of 1646MB size), can be compared by the following histogram, in terms of replication, the performance after alignment 4K is obvious The improvement, especially in the case of scattered small files, has nearly doubled the increase, which indirectly proves that after the alignment of 4K, it can effectively alleviate the system stall situation. (The smaller the value in the picture below, the better.) In the large-scale popularization of SSDs, there are still some times when there is no revolutionary technological breakthrough for the mainstream mechanical hard disk. The above test should lead to conclusions. Even the mechanical hard disk needs to be aligned to 4K, which is very helpful for the performance improvement of the hard disk. Although the performance improvement of 4K alignment is not as obvious as the change of the solid state, it is always improved, and no extra cost is required. Not for it? This article comes from [System Home] www.xp85.com