Paragon Alignment Tool Selected by Toshiba

Backup and disaster recovery software developer Paragon Software Group (PSG) announced that Toshiba America Information Systems, Inc. selected the Paragon Alignment Tool (PAT) for use with Toshiba’s Advanced Format (AF) hard disk drives.

"Windows operating systems before Vista experience a problem with 4K sectors called misalignment," said Tom Coughlin, founder of Coughlin Associates and author of Aligning with the Future of Storage. "Under some conditions, such as system migration, even newer Windows and Linux computers can suffer from block misalignment."

The Paragon Alignment Tool
for Toshiba AF 512e Drives provides:

• Checks and confirms the drive is properly aligned
• Automatically finds and realigns any misaligned partitions on hard disk drives using AF technology
• Features essential data protection by allowing alignment to continue after an interruption (e.g. power outage, or user reset) – even if Windows does not boot

"Advanced Format drives offer users increased capacity and enhanced data integrity. As AF drives become more prevalent, users with older operating systems and non-4K ready applications will need to ensure that their systems are optimized to take full advantage of the performance capabilities of 4K drives. This can easily be accomplished through the use of a software alignment tool," said Joel Hagberg, vice president of Marketing, Storage Device Division for Toshiba America Information Systems, Inc. "By partnering with Paragon Software, we can ensure that our customers are able to enjoy the full benefits of Advanced Format drives no matter what operating system or software applications they are using."

PAT is a software utility designed to automatically determine if a drive is misaligned, and then properly realign all existing partitions, including boot partitions (and any data they contain) to the correct 4K sector boundaries. This can increase performance by as much as 300 percent.

"Companies are susceptible to misalignment problems that will adversely affect the performance not only of their physical systems and storage arrays but also their virtual environments," said Tom Fedro, president of Paragon Software Group. "Symptoms to watch for include slow write times, inefficient disk operations, and overall poor performance. We have seen a significant increase in the amount of inquiries resulting from system crashes due to misalignment – unfortunately awareness of these problems has not yet permeated the industry, so many IT professionals are caught unaware."

The Paragon Alignment Tool for Toshiba AF 512e Drives is available to Toshiba customers free of charge. A version for other AF drives is available from Paragon Software’s Web site and is incorporated into Paragon’s other 4K-ready products such as Hard Disk Manager and Partition Manager.