I use Veeam Backup to perform volume-level backups. Until now, I was using a SATA SSD, and I decided to switch to an M.2 drive. I restored a Veeam backup to this M.2 drive, and everything seems to be working correctly. Is there anything I need to configure in the system to optimize the M.2 drive?
P.D. I’m using KDE Neon
Thanks.
if it working, sounds like you’re done unless you want to make any changes to the partition size or swap.
did this also move your swap to the nvme? you want that.
The copy is at the volume level, so it copies all the partitions, EFI, /, and swap. The problem (it happened to me before, with the old disk) is that KDE Partitioning tells me that the EFI and SWAP partitions are not aligned. Is this a problem? Could it affect performance? How can I align them?
Thanks.
It kinda is, sorry to say - but don’t worry, it’s not super urgent (don’t panic!) and pretty easily fixed. It’s not so much that it will effect performance, thought it can, as it will effect longevity of the device.
I’ll gloss over this briefly and vaguely, there’s lots about this online if you want the technically correct answer… I like these images to explain it. To understand, whenever you write to the drive, you have to write a whole page. If you’re writing part of a page, you will have to read the whole page, modify what you read, and then write the whole page.
Aligned partitions look like this:
One block of file system = one write to the drive. Cool.
Misaligned partitions, look like this:
One block of file system = two read, modify, writes to the drive. Uncool.
The idea is that you need to move the start and end of your partition to align them to the drive’s memory chips so they look like the top pic. Since it’s your boot drive, you’ll need to boot a USB stick. I’ll leave the choice up to you, but KDE Partition Manager is my preferred tool for this. When you choose Resize/Move, it will default to aligned partition boundaries. You can click the ‘Advanced’ button to check it.
Obviously you already have a backup so I can skip that warning 
Good luck!
Yes, that’s what I thought! So, I moved the partitions to the start of the disk and resized them with GParted (from a System Rescue USB Boot), and now all the warnings are gone.
Thanks!
Sorry to piggyback my question on top of your thread. But I noticed that all my SSDs show this error in the KDE Partition Manager. I have two internal M.2 NVME SSDs, one internal SATA SSD and one external USB SSD. All show errors that the partitions are not correctly aligned, all of them. The three internal disks were formatted as ext4 during Fedora installation. I didn’t go with the default btrfs scheme, the external USB SSD was formatted on Ubuntu as btrfs.
I have no idea why this happens and how to avoid this in the future.
Makes me think it might be a bug in the KDE Partition Manager? What do you think? I really don’t know what to think about this.
The curious thing is that if I move the partitions with GParted, the warning goes away, but I’ve had the issue where, when the system starts, it gives me a UUID error (WARNING! uuid…). I don’t remember exactly what the error was because I restored the hard drive again. But the UUID is correct, because I checked with blkid, en grub is correct.
+1.
I think quite a few linux installers don’t take care of this, or let you turn it off easily, or hide it, or some combo of the above. I had it with this machine, like you guys did, right out of the Tumbleweed installer.
I had to use a custom partition layout (to reserve the last 10% of the drive) and I suspect that this is where a lot of these things go wrong.
For example 
Now, yeh, I’m saying ‘user error’, but also, not. Obviously, I know what this is, and I know I want to have the partitions aligned. If I’d seen an option in the installer, I would have taken it, if I’d seen a notice that it wasn’t aligned, I would have fixed it there and then. As it was, I went ahead and somehow unknowingly broke it and left it that way until a month or so later when I happened to be partitioning another disk and saw those messages. If I can do it by accident, I’m certain that a LOT of users are also.
Honestly, I feel like in this day, partition alignment ought to be enabled by default unless it’s explicitly disabled, and I’ve seen this enough times, and now experienced it myself, to know that isn’t always the case. I don’t have enough info about it to go filing bug reports though. I don’t partition my disks frequently.
Anyway, KDE Partition Manager does make it nice and easy to fix up and for everything that isn’t your root partition you can unmount it and fix it from your usual desktop. And it does align partitions by default.
That sounds unrelated to partition alignment. Let’s hope it doesn’t make a comeback.
Yeah, partitions should be aligned by default. The user shouldn’t even know there is such thing.
I never had to worry about partition alignment on Windows for decades so this is all new to me. I recall MacOS has some similar issue way baaack when SSDs just came out, but I don’t remember ever having to worry about it on Windows. I shouldn’t have to. The OS should take care of that for me.
