Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 automatically eliminates volume misalignment – a situation, when volume clusters are not aligned with disk sectors. The misalignment occurs when recovering volumes created with the Cylinder/Head/Sector (CHS) addressing scheme to ahard disk drive (HDD) or solid-state drive (SSD) drive that has a 4-KB sector size. The CHS addressing scheme is used, for example, in all Windows operating systems earlier than Windows Vista.
If volumes are misaligned, the cluster overlaps more physical sectors than it would have occupied if aligned. As a result, more physical sectors need to be erased and rewritten each time the data changes. The redundant read/write operations noticeably slow down the disk speed and overall system performance. SSD drive misalignment decreases not only system performance, but drive lifetime. Since SSD memory cells are designed for a certain amount of read/write operations, redundant read/write operations lead to early degradation of the SSD drive.
When recovering dynamic volumes and logical volumes created in Linux with Logical Volume Manager (LVM), the appropriate alignment is set up automatically.
When recovering basic MBR and GPT volumes, you can select the alignment method manually if the automatic alignment does not satisfy you for some reason. The following options are available:
Use the following options only if you absolutely need to.