Question Aligning windows XP on a samsung 850 pro

[Rageypoo]

Hello! I'm currently building a retro PC that will have 2 SSDs one with XP and the other with Windows 7. I'd like to make sure that the XP SSD is alligned properly. I know very little about this other than a few sites have recommend using windows 7 to partition because it does 2048 byte blocks. My question is should I instead use a windows 10 or even windows 11 machine to do the partition instead so it's 1024 bytes? Would that be better?

Also, I will have 4 SSD's in total. 1 for XP, 1 for 7, and the other 2 will be for both. Would it be possible to RAID0 the remaining drives to use as a gaming drive D: for BOTH operating system? Or would that cause an issue? Should I instead use the extra drives individually for each operating system? (so XP would get 1 extra drive all for itself, and 7 its own extra drive)

Thank for the help! I hope these quesitons don't come off as extremely noob, I'm knowledgable to a point, it's been a VERY long time since i've messed with windows XP so I want to make sure I do everything right to not mess up the drives. I'm aware that I need to find a specific version of Samsung Magician for windows XP though i'm not sure which, in order to have TRIIM working on it. I will also have Windows 7 to fall back on to trim the drives when they are not in use. Does anyone have any extra input on how I should configure the SSD for windows XP so it doesn't destroy the drive? Thanks!

 

[ImWolf]

Your post does not mention the first thing you will need, which would be drivers supplied by the MB manufacturer so that XP will recognize the SSD drives. If you can obtain the drivers, you would then need to supply them during setup either via a 3.5 disk, or by creating a slipstream CD or thumb drive. Since these required drivers aren't always available, a lot of people will install a much newer OS first, and then setup XP as a VM.

It's been many years, but as I recall there are options during the setup of XP Pro that will allow you to create your partitions (you only need one?) and specify the FAU size during formatting. You can set these (File Allocation Units) as small as 512 bytes, but in today's world I don't think there's much advantage to having such tiny FAU's any more. I believe the default is 4096K.

 

[CelicaGT]

If the SSD is SATA or PATA you should not need any extra drivers. The easiest way to set the offset is to format the drive(s) using a modern OS. Otherwise it can be done with diskpart using the command line from your XP install media, get to a C: prompt, type diskpart and go from there. On diskpart itself, I cannot remember all the commands but there is a plethora of guides online. In fact, you can probably find some step by step guides for SSD setup for XP from that era as this was definitely one of the top questions people had. XP default offset was (iirc) 63KB requiring the read/write to 2 pages, Vista and later the offset went to 4096KB. As long as your offset is divisible by (again...iirc) 4KB you are fine. I used to set mine to 1024KB.