Migrated to an SSD and Facing Slowness? Here is Why and How to Fix it!

Got an upgrade to SSD and still having slow performance? Here is the possible reason why.

If you had an old hard drive and you got an upgrade by cloning the old hard drive on to new SSD then it’s possible that your SSD partition is not correctly aligned.

 What does Partition Alignment mean? And why does it matter?

A traditional hard drive normally starts its first partition on 64^th block leaving 63 blocks empty. While an SSD drive starts the first partition after 64 blocks which are 65^th. Generally, this problem wouldn’t come if you are installing windows from the scratch because windows installer identifies the partition type and aligns accordingly. If you just purchased a new computer that came with an SSD installed then you don’t have to worry your partitions will be correctly aligned too.

Cases where you clone your hard drive to an SSD drive then the software may not identify the partition alignment and it will lead to slower performance. But there is a fix for this which is easy too.

Checking the Partition Alignment status

To check if your partitions are correctly aligned open the system information tool. Click on Start and then type “msinfo32” and press enter. You can also open Run by pressing windows + R and type “msinfo32” and enter.

Once open go to Components>Storage>Disks. There you can see your SSD and look for “Partition Starting Offset” value below it. You can see all different partition has different offset value on the drive.

Now do some quick math and divide that number by 4096. If the result is an even number then your partition is correctly aligned and if not then you need to align it again.

For example, the number in picture dividing 1048576 with 4096 is 256.

You can see that there is no decimal balance and the number is evenly divisible. It means that all the sectors are properly aligned. If it came with a decimal balance (256.325), then it means that it’s not evenly dividable and sectors are not aligned properly.

Fixing Incorrect Partition Alignment

If you found your partition not correctly aligned then you need to fix it to get the very good speed boost. You might think of reinstalling windows and making the partitions from the scratch, but you don’t need to go that far. A simple partition manager tool can fix the issue for you. Though it can cause problems too. Precaution is better than cure so before anything goes wrong and causes the partition to fail, take a full data backup.

If you find that your partitions are incorrectly aligned, you can fix them and hopefully get a nice speed boost. Now you need a partition manager tool. We recommend using MiniTool Partition Wizard. For our use, you don’t need to purchase a premium. Download and install it on your computer and launch it. Simply right click on the partition you need to align and it will handle the further job for you.

Once aligning is done you can see the speed boost easily.

Newer SSD drives are amazingly fast but can cause problems in terms of data loss and speed. So always do the precaution of data backup before doing anything. In a case of data loss contact professional data recovery services for advice. If you don’t know what is happening with your SSD or it’s just not detecting then quit experimenting with it and go for an SSD Data Recovery Services to avoid data loss.