Is Acronis True Image Alignment Aware?

I have seen conflicting information on this forum on using Acronis to clone a HDD to a new SSD and its ability to correct or maintain alignment.

Here is a post from an Acronis employee on the Acronis website that may be helpful.

Begin Quote:
To summarize the latest data we have got from Acronis developers:
- the currently available products (Acronis True Image Home 2010, Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 etc) do not feature any specific support for the optimal offsets SSD drives require (that is multiples of 64kb);
- when doing restore operations that require partition tables to be re-created or modified (complete disk restore with partition resizing, restoring partitions onto unallocated space etc) the products will assume the default XP alignment which is the beginning of the second cylinder (63rd sector);
- when restoring/cloning drives or partitions that do not involve partition creation or modification of its size, the product will keep the offset you originally had (either that within the image or that of the target partition);
- we are currently developing the page size detection mechanism which will allow us to put in appropriate partition alignments (probably as an option during restore) and thus officially make our products "SSD-compliant". This option will almost certainly make it to Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 line but is still unconfirmed for Acronis True Image Home 2011 due to the time constraints;
- Acronis Disk Director 11 will be detecting the operating system in use and use its default partition alignment for operations with partitions. This means that, irrelevant of the type of the drives in use, it will automatically align partitions properly in an SSD-friendly fashion for Windows Vista/Windows 7 systems (it will use the default Windows Vista alignment of sector 2048 for Windows 7) while Windows XP will still align towards sector 63. That's not much of an issue for Acronis Disk Director though because you can modify those offsets easily using the basic functionality of this program.

I hope this will make things a bit clearer for everyone. This info is pretty much in tune with the tests MudCrab has run. You shouldn't have any problems if you are using the hard drives of the same size (or may be restore backups to the same drive to restore some of the files or partitions) - restoring the whole drive without resizing partitions will work ok for you. Migrating to a drive of a different size may be a bit trickier - while we are implementing the full support for the SSD drives you should stick to creating partitions with the correct offsets prior to the restore and then restoring partitions one by one (or may be even just mounting the partition to restore all the files via copy-paste). There are situations in which this may become tricky but you are now armed with the knowledge of how it works.
End Quote

And the alignment aware option did not make it into True Image Home 2011 but should be available in 2012. But do note that if you are aligned to begin with and use Win 7 it will maintain alignment. If you use XP it will not maintain alignment.

Perry

 

This is what I know: Acronis 2011 is not offcially allignment aware.

But, if you choose 'clone full disk', the partition will be properly aligned.

 

Well then, what are you supposed to use to clone a SSD drive? I used to use an old version of Ghost, then went to Acronis 2011. I just purchased a SSD and people are saying conflicting things...

 

What SSD did you buy? Intel offers a disk cloning / transfer program that maintains alignment and it's made by Acronis.

I agree it's annoying though there's no good software out there that guarantees alignment.

 

In Acronis 2011 choose Clone full disk and you will be fine.

 

I picked up a Intel 510 120GB SSD. I don't just want to copy it. I always save 3 images of my main PC:

1) Fresh Windows Load
2) Fresh Windows Load with Drivers
3) Fresh Windows Load with Drivers and software

Makes a 'system restore' a 20 minute ordeal.

 

I do it in a similar way, but I need only about 8 minutes to restore my full loaded system of about 12 GB with DriveSnapshot.

 

Again, in Windows 7 if you start with an aligned HDD you will have an aligned clone. If in XP you won't.

So 2011 will not correct alignment but it will maintain alignment.

Simple enough to check. Download AS SSD benchmark and run it. If you original HDD is aligned so will the clone be (if you are using Win 7). AS SSD will have the size of the disk and OK printed in green if all is well.

Perry

 

That was a lot simpler than the start post