Partition Alignment?

  • Hello everyone. I have been given the task to verify that tasked to verify our drives that house tempdb & our sql server data files are aligned. I have read a variety of info on the subject and am confused.

    This following seems to be very straight foward (if i understand it correctly):

    http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/paul/using-diskpart-and-wmic-to-check-disk-partition-alignment/

    You just look at diskpart and look at the offset? I was looking at all the drives attached to our san i believe all of them seemed have an offset of 31-32KB. Does this mean its misaligned? Shouldn't it be like 1024?

    He then talks about wmic:

    wmic partition get BlockSize, StartingOffset, Name, Index

    which to be honest am not quite sure how to tell if your disk is aligned or not by the output.

    Then there is the more complicated approach:

    http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jimmymay/archive/2008/12/04/disk-partition-alignment-sector-alignment-for-sql-server-part-4-essentials-cheat-sheet.aspx

    where maybe you have to take stripe unit size into account when your trying to determine disk alightment and just make sure the result of the calculations he provides (2) are zero?

    I don't know if it matters but all the drives i'm checking are attached xiotech san drives. At this point i have no idea what the "Stripe unit size" but of course will find out if needed.

    Unfortunately if you guys need me to check something i won't be able to until Monday morning.

  • If the offsets are 31-32kb, you're misaligned.

    You need to reformat the drives with the offset to match your stripe sizing.

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