Cluster size?

[John Connor]

I was wondering if I change the cluster size on a HDD to 1024 instead of 4096 would it be more CPU friendly? Most of the files I have are 1 MB or less and the primary foucs is better CPU utilization in FS2004.

 

[ctk1981]

Now I'm going off of foggy memory from back in the day, but larger cluster size will generally give you more speed/less fragmentation but smaller files will waste more space.

 

[Cerb]

No. Smaller than 4K will just increase the work your SSD or HDD has to do, and will turn off some deep optimizations for 4K usage (mmapping that gets complicated with non-4K sizes). If your files are sufficiently small, compression might help, though. Disabling 8.3 names, if it doesn't break any old software you use, could improve things a bit, too.

P.S. TIL you can disable atime in Windows (this and nixing 8.3 are probably your best bets):
http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/...indows-vista-to-improve-ntfs-performance.aspx
http://www.windowsreference.com/windows-7/enabledisable-last-access-timestamp-in-windows/

Some numbers:
http://ejrh.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/cluster-size-experiment/
http://www.wilson-it.com/resources/vmwarentfsclusters.pdf

 

[John Connor]

Looks like I will compress and leave the 4096 in tact. Thanks!

 

[Deders]

If you are going to compress the filesystem then that will add CPU overhead to decompress every time you access data.

 

[John Connor]

No, just FS2004 files. I have tried to compress the entire OS once on my laptop and the SSD speed up was impressive, but when I rebooted the OS it couldn't read the boot loader or something like that. So I had to plug the drive into my desktop with a USB to SATA adapter and access the drive and decompress.


FS2004 needs all the CPU performance it can get as it's primarily a CPU orientated sim. So maybe I won't compress.