Speed Up Your SSD By Correctly Aligning Your Partitions

If you have a newer SSD drive you have to make sure that the partition alignment is setup correctly. Otherwise, you might be sacrificing some of your performance.

LifeHacker did a great article called "Speed Up Your SSD By Correctly Aligning Your Partitions", here is an excerpt: "To see if your partitions are aligned correctly, hit the Start menu and type in msinfo32. Enter Msinfo32 and go to Components > Storage > Disks. Look for your SSD on the list and find the "Partition Starting Offset" item. If this number is divisible by 4096 (that is, if dividing it by 4096 equals a whole number and not a decimal), your partition is correctly aligned. If not, you need to realign it. " (read the rest of the article here)