@UDMA133, ISTM that several of your observations are the opposite of what one would expect if the partition were misaligned. Other observations don't make sense irrespective of the alignment.
My first query would be in respect of the large variation in wakeup times. I'm assuming that most of this time is involved with reading the HIB.SYS file from the HDD and writing it to RAM, without any significant system overhead. Conversely, I'm assuming that the majority of the hibernate time involves reading from RAM and writing to disc. You state that your data are located at the outer zones of the drive, in which case the sustained data transfer rate would be about 200MB/s (the Product Manual specifies 210MB/s). Therefore, if my assumptions are correct, reading a 2GB file would require about 10 seconds. Furthermore, Microsoft's documentation suggests that the HIB.SYS file is compressed, in which case we might expect that this time would be reduced to 5 seconds. Your figures of 1 minute, or 3 minutes, appear to be much too high. In any case, one would expect that these numbers would be consistent and repeatable, without the kind of wild variation that you have observed.
You state that "putting the PC in hibernate was *SLOW*, resuming was *REALLY SLOW*". In other words you are saying that writing the HIB.SYS file was much faster than reading it. In fact this is exactly the opposite of what one would expect of a misaligned partition. An Advanced Format HDD suffers no performance penalty when reading a partial physical sector. OTOH, writing a partial sector involves a read-modify-write cycle, which necessitates an additional rotation of the platters. This results in a significant drop in write performance.
Nevertheless, after applying Paragon's alignment utility, you say that "hibernate works fast again! Like it used to with the older [250GB] drive". So, how fast is fast, and is the new drive faster than the old one? Can you give us some actual numbers? What is your new drive's firmware version, CC4x or CC9x?
