Cluster size in WinXP on NTFS ?

Broadkipa

Senior member
Dec 18, 2000
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A question to all using the ntfs file system in Win XP. I read an article that said when you convert your hard drive from Fat 32 to ntfs Windows will set the cluster size to 512 bytes. I checked this on my computer and sure enought the cluster size is 512 bytes. the article said that perfomance will suffer from such cluster size. My question is what size of cluster are you XP users using and is ther any perfomance to be gained by resizing my cluster size to say 4Kbs which was the size in Fat 32. HERE IS THE ARTICLE:


ThSolution for Windows XP NTFS Slowdowns

A few people have written to me about problems they've had with big slowdowns in their Windows XP systems after converting their FAT32 drives to NTFS. At first, I thought the problem might be more apparent than real, but too many people have noticed the same thing! I ran into an answer to this problem in Scot Finnie's newsletter [http://www.scotfinnie.com/newsletter/default.htm] and tried out his advice. The problem lies in the "cluster size" set for the NTFS partition. When you convert from FAT32 to NTFS, the convert program automatically selects the cluster size, and it invariably selects 512 bytes. That creates an incredible number of clusters on the disk, and slows things down on NT based machines, but apparently more in XP than in other NT based operating systems (such as Windows NT 3.1/3.51/4.0/Win2k). There's no fix for this in the box. You have to get a 3rd party utility. The one I've used is Paragon Partition Manager. It allows you to change your cluster size without losing data. But I'll tell you one thing - it is SLOW. On a 2GHz Pentium 4 machine, it took over a day to complete the conversion on a 30 GB hard disk. On another test, the conversion attempt resulted in an "Error" dialog. I restarted the Windows XP Home computer and chkdsk ran automatically and found about 20,000 corrupt directories entries. But guess what? The computer booted up after 2 hours of chkdsk! If you're brave and want to give it a shot, you can get a copy at:
http://www.winxpnews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=020326TI-Partition_Manager
is is the Article that got me wondering!
 

Nothinman

Elite Member
Sep 14, 2001
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The performance increase comes from the fact that the hard disk has to do less seeks to read the same amount of data, if I want to read 8K at most I must do 2 seeks, but if I have 512b clusters I may have to do up to 16 seeks, and seeks are the slowest part of a hard drives activities.

And fragmentation, if I have a 16K file on 512b clusters it's possible to get broken up into 32 fragments, with 4K clusters it can only get broken up into 4 fragments.

I personally wouldn't trust a utility to resize the clusters, I would backup and reinstall from scratch.
 

Broadkipa

Senior member
Dec 18, 2000
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Thanks for the reply, I have infact taken the plunge and converted my cluster size from 512bytes to 4Kbs using a program called Partition Manager by Paragon Software. It took an hour and a half to convert a 30 Gig hard drive and also 3 quarters of an hour for scandisk to run after the reboot.
I then ran Diskeeper to defrag the drive and all is working ok. It's to soon to say if there is any perfomance increase or weather or not the drive will become less fragmented. Watch this space!
 

Broadkipa

Senior member
Dec 18, 2000
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I'm surprised that more people have not replied to this post. There must be quite a few people out there that are running XP with NTFS file system. If your cluster size is only 512bytes then you will suffer a large amount of fragmentation and slower performance. I have read that 4Kb is the optimum cluster size. This post was just way of finding out if people where aware of this problem.
 

BlackAspic

Member
Oct 24, 2001
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i got that program to do the same thing, but whenever i try and convert, it instantly says i must reboot, but when I do nothing happens.

???