SSD partition alignment

[captain_fail]

I'm creating partitions in parted on an Intel DCS3610 and a little perplexed about what constitutes proper alignment.

The drive reports logical/physical sector size as 512B/4096B, and the first partition begins at sector 2048, the first 1MiB boundary. I've created an extended partition at sector X which is also at a 1MiB boundary. The issue I'm having is that if I create a 10GB logical partition in the extended partition, parted wants me to create the next partition at the next 1MiB boundary, so at sector X + 10GB + 2048s. This results in a wasted 2048 sectors between each partition. Why can't I create the next partition at X + 10GB + 4096B? That would seem to be aligned but align-check reports that it is not aligned unless I go to the next 1MiB boundary. Is this right?

I need to create 6 logical partitions and it seems sub-optimal to have 1MiB wasted unpartitioned space between each partition.

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

parted and other alignment-aware tools (i.e. almost all of them now) will want both the beginning and the end of the partition to be wholly aligned. IIRC you can use advanced options to turn off the sector alignment if you really want to but "wasting" 2048 sectors here and there amounts to only a few MB of space across the whole drive.

Incidentally, is using a volume manager like LVM an option here? Instead of worrying about alignment across several partitions I find it much easier to create one or two physical partitions and then use LVM to chop it up further; all recent versions of LVM also align automatically.

 

[captain_fail]

Thanks! I probably shouldn't worry about the lost space. If 60 megs is an issue then what that really means is I need a bigger drive.

I can't really use LVM here because some of the partitions will be split across different OSs. Otherwise, yes that would be the sensible choice.