Choose the correct sector of partition to align my HDD

[Nico74]

Hello to everybody and congratulations for this wonderful forum!
Through the software Aomei I discovered that my secondary HDD is not aligned.
To align it I have to set the sector of partition to align.
I don't know what value to choose for my hard disk SATA Western Digital Caviar Blue 1 TB WD10EZEX.
Maybe I have to choose 515 or 1024 or 2048 or 4096? Or what else? Does anyone know how to help me?
Thank You

[data-medics]

Any number that is divisible by 8 should work as a starting sector. Though it only matters on SSD drives. For HDDs it makes absolutely no difference.

[data-medics]

Probably the only reason that Aomei is warning you is just in case you plan to clone to an SSD.

[fzabkar]

Any number that is divisible by 8 should work as a starting sector. Though it only matters on SSD drives. For HDDs it makes absolutely no difference.

Of course it matters for HDDs. If the partition is not aligned for Advanced Format drives, then you pay a serious performance penalty during writing, due to the read-modify-write cycle.

Advanced Format Technology Brief:
http://www.hgst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/te ... hbrief.pdf

When the host attempts to write a single 512-byte logical block, the hard drive will first read the 4K physical sector containing the 512 bytes that are to be overwritten. Next, it will insert the 512 bytes of new data and write the entire 4K block of data back to the media. This process is called a “Read-Modify-Write”. The drive must read the existing data, modify a subset, and then write the data back to the disk. This process can require additional revolutions of the hard disk.

[data-medics]

Given the read/write buffering that modern drives do, the difference is pretty much negligible unless you plan on running a database with 500 concurrent users. SSD's is where alignment really matters as the extra wear is an issue.