Can someone please help me with this topic.
I have a Dimension 3100 which came originally with an WD80 GB SATA hard drive. Operating system is XP and I use Chrome as my search engine.
I started to run into stability problems last year and the system was running very slowly. I purchased a second HD last year (WD160GB) from Tekheads for data storage. All my data is now stored on the second drive. In the meantime I have purchased System Mechanic Pro for housekeeping. It is an excellent tool for this but one issue is puzzling me - why am I experiencing 100,000 misaligned files on a regular basis?
I recently purchased another WD160GB HD from Tekheads and using WD Acronis have cloned the original 80GB drive onto this (and thought that the problem might go away). It's still with me.
On searching for clues I came across references to 512 and 4K sectors. Is this the source of my problem and would WD Align fix it?
Would really appreciate some help here!!!!!
Hi matey, welcome to the forums! :ptu:
This is called sector misalignment, and tbh it would not be the cause of any issues other than perhaps your drive operating potentially slower than it should do.
The gist of it is, all your files are saved on the drive split into sectors at a predetermined size, whether it be 4k, 512k, 1024k, etc. Where sector alignment comes into it is that there is a reserve amount of space at the start of the drive for overhead which is set when you first format the drive, what can happen is that the point at which your drive is told to start saving files from can cross two of these sector boundaries if the alignment is not set appropriately when you format the drive, meaning every write will potentially need to write into two sectors instead of one because of this overlap. However, this would not in any way affect the integrity of your data, nor cause any noticeable problems. The only reason sector alignment has recently become a concern is because of SSD solid state drives - these operate a lot faster than regular mechanical hard drives, and having the sectors misaligned has been shown to cause a negative impact on performance with these drives. It's probably not something anyone would ever notice with an average mechanical HDD.
I would suggest there is probably another root cause for your slowdowns and stability issues, I take it you have gone through the usual motions of antivirus, spyware checks, defragmenting, etc?
I would have suggested an OS Reinstall at first, backing up any needed files, could have saved yourself buying System Mechanic Pro and 2 extra drives.
You can also download free software for system housekeeping, take a look at http://www.filehippo.com/ just remember to untick boxes for bundled software with the program you want, (they bundle it in some software to keep the programs free).
I find OS's do get gradually slower overtime as they get choked up with junk and sometimes the Housekeeping software won't help.