SSD Alignment and Provisioning

(I stopped the first test midway due to painful slowness)

After installing my new bargain basement ($49.99 after rebate) OCZ Trio N150 240GB, the read speeds were abysmal. I used AOMEI Backupper to clone the current OS.

First I fixed "over provisioning", which is simply leaving 7-10% unallocated space on the hard drive. I did not screen shot the results but it improved 10 to 20 MB/s. There is some controversy to this.

Then I fixed the alignment. I used AOMEI Partition Assistant to fix the alignment. The results were impressive. Minitool Partition Wizard also works for alignment.

This was done in my bottom feeding $250 Dell Optiplex 7010 Mini Tower i5. Dell disabled RAID in BIOS so I question if a PCIe NVMe would boot. Decided simple SATA SSD was sufficient.

Align Hard Drive Partition

AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard
or
Minitool Partition Wizard

It's free.

Check the alignment with AS-SSD

Also free.

I used it on an old Raptor drive and it worked. It trashed the drive letter and I used Windows install disk (USB actually) to fix. It recognized the problem on it's own and fixed it without any input from me.

Sadly I did not benchmark before fixing so don't know if it helped.