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I saw article about Disk alignment here and also here.Also there where some references that windows server 2003 has some problem with disk alignment. After reading article I am confused whether we need to align the Disk alignment manually or it will be done automatically when we do partition the disk. What we do generally is when installing OS we perform disk partition and then for extra disk which added we do partition by using diskmgmt.msc(Disk management) So whether we require to do any alignment for windows server 2012 server also?

IT researcher
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1 Answers1

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Windows Server 2008 and newer versions will automatically align partitions optimally. There's nothing you need to do. This was a problem in older versions of Windows. The first paragraph in the summary section of this Disk Partition Alignment Best Practices for SQL Server whitepaper makes mention of this functionality (the paper is SQL Server-related, however the statement about partition alignment is generic to Windows Server).

Evan Anderson
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  • ok. So for windows server 2003 R2 we need to disk alignment. – IT researcher Jan 18 '14 at 09:12
  • As a matter of fact, the problem is the old windows did IIRC a 16kb start segment - so everything was off (for example for 64kb segments ). Windows 2008+ does a 512kb block that it leaves empty, so everything is aligned to 512kb, which fits perfectly to pretty much every raid setup. – TomTom Jan 18 '14 at 09:15
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    +1 for this. I'm ready to put this question to bed. It's almost as tired as 'how big do I make my pagefile'. – Ryan Ries Jan 18 '14 at 13:51