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allocation unit size in W2K ?

S

sean2002

Golden Member
here's my question, I just reinstalled Win2K pro to see if my slipstreamed CD worked and at the same time added another HD I had laying around. I used IBM and Maxtor's LLF utilities to wipe the drives clean then partitioned them both during the Win2K install, and formatted C: in NTFS and did the install. After it was done I tried to install some programs on my D: drive (Maxtor Diamondmax +60 20gb) and Win2K said the drive needed to be formatted. So I right clicked and choose format then NTFS but I also needed to state the allocation size ? it gave me a bunch of choices and I picked 4096bytes, was this the right size to pick ? if not what is best ?
 
From something I clipped long ago:

By matching the allocation unit size with the amount of data that you typically transfer to and from the disk, you'll incur lower disk subsystem overhead and gain better overall performance. To determine the size of your average disk transfer, use Performance Monitor to review two counters (Avg. Disk Bytes/Read and Avg. Disk Bytes/Write).

Also, see:

http://www.microsoft.com/TechNet/winnt/optntfs.asp
 
Yes, 4096 was the best choice. Anything higher and you start getting a lot of wasted space, anything lower and you'll probably be just using more disk overhead.

I've never had W2K ask me for a cluster size, I guess it must be a new feature in SP2.
 
Choose the higest cluster size you can (16k, 32k or more).
In spite of choosing the smaller cluster size (in order to reduce the slack space), I suggest you forget the wasted disk space. Today hds are cheaper than ever.
With a higer cluster size, the disk will spend less time to assembly a file, specially the big files. The hd is the slowest component in all the system and today all efforts in order to increase the speed of the hd are more important than slack space. This is my opinion.

I am about to perform some tests under W2K to evaluate how much the cluster size affects the drive performance.
 
I doubt you'll notice any difference if you go to a higher cluster size than 4K. Unless you're editing a lot of video on the computer, it's not worth the space.
 


<< Choose the higest cluster size you can (16k, 32k or more).
In spite of choosing the smaller cluster size (in order to reduce the slack space), I suggest you forget the wasted disk space. Today hds are cheaper than ever.
With a higer cluster size, the disk will spend less time to assembly a file, specially the big files. The hd is the slowest component in all the system and today all efforts in order to increase the speed of the hd are more important than slack space. This is my opinion.

I am about to perform some tests under W2K to evaluate how much the cluster size affects the drive performance. >>



That may be true, but I do not believe that the NTFS &quot;File Compression&quot; feature will work on cluster sizes that are greater than 4096. So if let's say storage size is more important to you, then 4096 would probably be the ideal size to use.
 
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