Re: Cloning between (i.e. to & from) 512 bytes/sect
I've recently done almost exactly what you are up to at this point, so I can probably make your life easier 
If your original partition (on the Toshiba drive) is not corrupted, it is relatively easy and safe to clone it to a new MXT drive (if it is a good drive, without SD24 or SD25 firmwares, be careful at this). If the firmware is SD24 or SD25, please first update to SD28 and run a full erase to clear up the SSD component.
First of all, the Momentus XT 500 GB (model ST95005620AS) is NOT a 4K sector drive. It has the old 512 Byte sectors:
http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/disc/ma
Only the new MXT 750 GB has physical 4K sectors:
http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/docs/ma
Now, it is however, important to still align to 4K, since you have an SSD component (which always works with 4K sectors).
At any time you can easily check where does a partition start by typing msinfo32 in Start->Run.
There you will see, for each partition on each of your installed drives, the "Partition Starting Offset". The operating system always works with 512-byte LBAs (logical block address). Older drives also have 512-byte physical sectors. However, newer drives have 4096 byte physical sectors (8 LBAs in length).
For old, non-aligned partitions (such as those created with Windows XP, for example) you will see the first partition having an offset of 32256 bytes=(63 physical sectors x 512 bytes) (63 LBAs x 512 bytes). This offset is a multiple of 512 bytes, but it is NOT a multiple of 4096 bytes, hence a non-aligned partition (to the 4K = 4096-byte physical sectors). To make things clear, the partition starts at LBA=63 (leaving the previous LBAs from 0 to 62 as an offset).
New, 4K aligned partitions should usually have an offset being a multiple of 4096 bytes (4K sectors). Usually the offset is 1048576 bytes=(256 physical sectors x 4096 bytes) (2048 LBAs x 512 bytes). The partition starts at LBA=2048, leaving the previous LBAs from 0 to 2047 as an offset.
You can use Acronis True Image (I don't know about Paragon) to first create an image file of your partition(s) (it's called backup in Acronis). Then, you can recover the partition(s) from that image to the new drive, starting with a manually specified offset. Be careful to first recover the C partition, and all subsequent partitions one at a time, and only at the end to recover the MBR+Track 0 (This is the basic trick, actually). The partition C from your 512-byte sector drive Toshiba, most probably aligned with an offset of 32256 bytes, will have to be copied to the MXT drive, starting at t new position , with offset equal to 1 MB = 1048576 bytes. All subsequent partition will be 4K aligned.
To reply to your other question, from a performance point of view, it doesn't matter for an old drive with 512-byte physical sectors wether a partition residing on it is 4K aligned or not. For a 4K-sector drive, OTOH, the performance is heavily impacted if the partition does not have a starting offset, multiple of 4096 bytes.
Hope this helps.
This is a mid-line computer that sold for maybe $600-$700.
Depending on the application and the frequency of disk access --- interface and disk performance of an attached eSATA (used only for backup and not for regular disk access by the OP) is probably irrelevant.
For the trouble of doing high jumps and contortutions, a much safer and cleaner solution is to:
A) do a fresh install to eliminate the performance and other hits from incompatibilites.
B) Buy a new computer for $1,000 with provisions for 2 drives on board
http://www.toshiba.ca/web/product.grp?lg=en§io
Specifications on the Toshiba:
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Hey,
First, great post from Kryptex, but with way to many number 
While i don't recall exactly where i've seen this, partition alignement is important in almost all situation. It allow you to squeeze the last performance drop from a Hard drive, being SSD or HDD. To perform a SSD alignement there must be some knowledge about the flash chip, page size come to mind and maybe erase block size. For hdd, it is regarding the size of sector that the disk hold. The alignment should consider the block size that your file system is using. You just match everything correctly and Voila, performance. It is not over complicated.
The question is, do we have enough information about the flash used in the MXT, and do we have enough information about the write performed to the flash?
I would treat it like a normale HDD.
In my case, I just align hard drive to a 4K boundary, it is not a big loss of data.
Klok
