Selecting the option "SORT" in stages like Lookup,

[sudeepmantri]

Hi,
I need to fine tune my job in order for a better performance; Wherever I use Lookup, join or merge I am using Hash partitioning with the sort option(No question of changing the HASH as record counts are extremely high 340 million). I just wanna know is the sort necessary in this case. I mean whenever a hask key assigned to a value the keys are stored automatically in the Index table in sorted order right. So it hardly matters if I sort them or not as there are 2 fields in the table which Identify a record uniquely and on both of them I applying the HASH (Both in Master, input and Update, Reference link)....

Suggestions are highly appreciated

Thanks in advance
Sudeep