Allocation unit size when formattting.

[Starrx05]

When you format an USB drive in Windows using Disk Manager, it asks for allocation unite size. Should I jus pick the defaut setting or there's any particular size that will work better? My hard drive is 250G. Thanks.

 

[Sandan]

It really depends on your specific needs. For example my 160Gig drive is split 4times at 40gigs per. I have a dual boot system so XP is on one partition, Vista on another, I use one for Games, and one for Junk and for another copy of things I want to make sure isn't destroyed. This fits my needs well. If something happens to an operating system I can go to my Junk drive to get important things. Hope this helps

 

[nova2]

there are some things to consider.

> partitions with large cluster size for all fat files (AVIs, games, etc).

> partitions with small cluster size for any files.

eg: if the cluster size is 16KB, then a file that is 1KB will take up 16KB due to cluster size.

> large cluster size:
-- makes defragmenting faster, but I don't have percentages to base off of.
-- improves performance

> defragmenting one badly fragmented 240gb partition will take far longer to complete, in contrast to a 80gb partition. (not accounting for possible power outages too, heh)

 

[thecoolnessrune]

As nova said, if you have all large files (like video files) get the largest cluster size you can to improve performance (I believe that 4MB in NTFS). But in the case of NTFS, that would mean a 500 byte text file would still take up 4MB of space :laugh:. So as you can see, if you aren't dealing explicitly with large files, its very impractical.

However, just the opposite is true. If you have millions of tiny files on your comp, you can get the most out of your harddrive by choosing a small unit (I believe on NTFS it is 256 bytes).

The default for NTFS is *I believe* 4KB. So just see what your putting most often on your thumbdrive. If its just miscellaneous, just use the default.