I am about to for another format and install Windows 7 Professional x64 Are there any performance benefits by formatting in GPT or MBR is better? bare in mind that my SSD is only 256 GB in size so I don't care about the fact that GPT supports partitions of 2.2 TB or higher, I just care about the best peformance Also, when I used to format, I always used to create the partitions manually using DISKPART and align them to 4096 to eliminate the creation of the extra system partition that keeps a copy of the boot files, is that a good idea? What about the MSR Reserved partition that gets created automatically when you crate a partition on a GPT disk using the Windows 7 Partition screen?? what's that for?