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!
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!
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