I'd tried moving the partitions around but without a 1024 block partition to butt up against they always remained unaligned. I had some more fun trying to shrink sda1 which resulted in me toasting ...

is partition alignment just for ssd? if not, is there any advantage for non-ssd? i've heard of the paragon alignment tool..doing it.. though prob not free and don't know if it's good. Only plain old ...