Checking disk offset with WMIC and DiskPart (aligning partitions)
It has been well discussed that aligning disk partitions is very critical to achieving maximum performance. It seems that the newer operating systems automatically create aligned disk partitions but I was curious to find out how to determine whether the current partition is aligned. After some googling, I found the following:
wmic partition get BlockSize, StartingOffset, Name, Index
Running this will show the starting offset of each disk and partition.
Running DiskPart and listing the partitions will also show a rounded up value of the offset.
It seems that starting offsets of 1048576 (WMIC) or 1024kb (DISKPART) indicate correctly aligned partitions. The solution for incorrectly aligned partitions seems to be extensive disk tools or basically formatting and realigning the disk.