so what is allignment for ssd

so im reading here in there that you should leave a particular amount of unpartitioned space on your ssd when setting up windows 7 for performance....i didnt do this on my agility 3 120.....what should i have done and how much performance increase is it anyway?

 

I'd recommend you head over to the OCZ forums and take a read, they have a lot of information in relation to this, however, this is the brief idea:

Alignment and provisioning are not the same thing (you say alignment in your thread subject, but you are talking about provisioning).

If you're installing Win7 to a bare OCZ drive (this does not mean other manufacturers) you do need to do anything, Win7 will align properly. In addition, OCZ drives are over provisioned by design and therefore you do not need to do it yourself, there is a section of the drive total capacity (over and above the 120gig that your drive says it has) that is not user accessible to allow for proper wear leveling and garbage collection.

Read this, it will help you immensely. Again this is OCZ SPECIFIC, I am not referring to any other brands here (although many others do overprovision their drives for the same reason):

Guide THE BASIC GUIDE & FAQ - ABC for OCZ SSD

EDIT:

Some of the OCZ specific information is useful with any SSD, much is not related. Many manufacturers over provision their drives as I mention, and almost all should align properly when installing Win7/Vista to a bare drive (XP does not do partition alignment and will require manual alignment).

 

Windows 7 will align itself properly with a 100mb partition +/- the bits it needs to align. Vista will also, as well as Server 2008 R1 and R2. XP and server 2003 need to diskpart with align=x.

 

If you did a fresh windows 7 install you have nothing to worry about. Windows 7 will automatically do 4k alignment and a system partition.