Paragon-Download provides Partition Manager / Alignment Tool & Deployment Management Software

Paragon Alignment Tool for Dell PC Users

Paragon Alignment Tool (PAT) 3.0 Scriptable Staging Edition is a powerful and flexible utility which automatically corrects misaligned 4K physical and virtual drives for optimum performance and longevity.

The enterprise IT department of large corporations are tasked with implementing images for thousands of newly purchased desktops, laptops and servers that incorporated 4K AFDs and the associated alignment challenges. PAT 3.0 Scriptable Staging Edition is a flexible scriptable command line version of PAT that efficiently scans disks, determines alignment status and automatically provides post-configuration image alignment. Command line and Windows PE based versions enable deploying systems loaded with legacy operating systems on 4k Drives.

Windows Server 2003 (as well as Windows XP and earlier versions of Windows operating systems) may misalign “advanced format” 4K drives (AFDs) with an offset 1 sector, causing redundant read/write operations that significantly degrade I/O performance. These operating systems also recognize and work only with logical disk sectors of 512 byte size. While large sectors reduce the amount of ECC (Error Correction Code) and head positioning (servo code) data on a hard drive, and provide superior read/write performance and increased capacity, if the OS architecture works only with logical sectors of 512 bytes, the benefits of increased capacity can be diminished by the performance hit to the drive.

Paragon Alignment Tool solves these problems by determining if the 4K drive is misaligned and then realigning all partitions (including the boot partition) to 4K sector boundaries, without affecting the operating system or any data.