For those of you using SANs, whether Fiber Channel or ISCSI, don’t forget to align your partitions for best performance.

Windows 2003 SP1 and newer.

1. Open a command prompt, and execute Diskpart.exe.
2. Diskpart>List Disk
3. Diskpart>Select Disk X
4. Diskpart>Create Partition Primary Align=64  (64kb = 128 sectors)
5. Diskpart>Assign Letter=<DriveLetter>
6. Once the drive letter is assigned, type exit to exit out of the Diskpart utility.
7. Use the Disk Management snap-in or the Windows Format command to format the partition with NTFS.

 Download the EMC engineering whitepaper for all the gory details:

Download EMCAlignPartition Version 1

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