Checking Partition Alignment with PowerShell

Here is an easy way to determine the partition alignment of any given disk on the local system or remotely.

$OffsetKB = @{label=”Offset(KB)”;Expression={$_.StartingOffset/1024 -as [int]}}

$SizeMB = @{label=”Size(MB)”;Expression={$_.Size/1MB -as [int]}} 

Get-WmiObject -ComputerName "localhost" -Class "Win32_DiskPartition" | ft`

SystemName, Name, DiskIndex, $SizeMB, $OffsetKB  -AutoSize

This will output table that looks like this:

Why should you care about this?  This is particularly useful for determining partition alignment of existing disks that may be running applications like Exchange or SQL.  Exchange recommends a 64K partition alignment as does SQL in most cases.  In Windows Server 2008, partition alignment is automatic and defaults to 1024KB for new partitions. Note that the alignment of partitions on servers that were upgraded from Windows 2003 to 2008 are not changed.