[ale] Realigning a partition with data

[DJ-Pfulio]

I don't think alignment matters on SSDs. They are so fast.

I've done this with gparted, but always made a full partition backup
using fsarchiver first.  Didn't need the backup, but ... I'm pretty
experienced with the tools.

Also, the underlying file system matters.  XFS/btrfs seem to have the
most issues.  EXT3/4 seem to be well supported for things like this.  IMHO.

gparted and parted have always handled alignment issues. I heard that
fdisk started sometime after they added GPT support (whenever that was).
I've never used gdisks after seeing all the problems people had with it.
 Heard that fdisk is safe on GPT again, for the latest distros.

I have a K2/200 around here somewhere. Keep it for the 5.25in floppy.
Never know when that will be needed again.  That machine also has an
Adaptec 2940u SCSI card. ;)

On 04/23/2017 02:56 PM, Alex Carver wrote:
> True, I just wondered if there was a way given that parted/resize2fs
> both worked pretty well with data on a partition (I ddrescue'd the old
> drive to the SSD then grew the partition).
> 
> However, after running a couple I/O tests on the drive I'm not going to
> bother with the realignment.  I'm getting read speeds of about 160
> MB/sec and write speeds of 116 MB/sec.  Given the age of the machine
> that's pretty good (AMD K6 with a PCI SATA card and SATA SSD to replace
> the on-board IDE and old Maxtor drives)
> 
> On 2017-04-23 05:04, Jim Kinney wrote:
>> I would not consider realignment safe with data on the sectors that are soon to 
>> be outside the partition.
>>
>> On Apr 23, 2017 2:00 AM, "Alex Carver" <agcarver+ale at acarver.net 
>> <mailto:agcarver%2Bale at acarver.net>> wrote:
>>
>>     Just swapped out a spinning drive for an SSD but I probably need to
>>     realign the partitions.  Currently everything is in one partition at the
>>     start of the disk but it's on sector 63.  I can pop the disk out and
>>     plug it into another machine to do this but I'd like to slide the
>>     partition over to the right spot (assuming this doesn't affect the boot
>>     process).  I haven't found a way to do this as nearly every page I find
>>     talks about having parted align new partitions but not those that have data.