SCSIfreek,
I love it. Just can't be fast enough, huh? Well, I'm hardly an expert on performance tuning, especially when it comes to games. I've hardly ever focused primarily on speed. To me, I guess because of the types of situations I've worked in and the types of systems I've worked on, it's all about reliability. Not that reliability as a concern is incompatible with speed.
To tell you the truth, on most systems I've used, the difference in performance between 512 byte clusters and 4,096 byte clusters in an NTFS partition, especially on a fast SCSI drive, is probably negligible until the partition size gets fairly large. It appears that the main drag on performance in an NTFS partition with fragmentation seems to occur when the MFT becomes badly fragmented, internally or externally. The rest of the file system can be scattered to the four winds, but as long as the MFT and pagefile haven't been affected, the system will maintain most of its "zip". (Obviously, a hard drive with high seek and access times would throw a monkey wrench into that assertion.) Some of the third party defraggers will perform a boot time defragmentation of the MFT when it reaches a certain level of fragmentation. But they do require time and resources to run. On a standalone system that doesn't have to be in functional service all the time, it's okay to crank up the old defragger when the system isn't being useful. The problem with servers is that there's often no decent time to run a defragger. And I don't care what any defragger vendor says, background defragging sags most server I've seen, and pretty badly -- at least if they run anywhere near their potential. Heck, one of those dorky, fancy screensavers can make a server sag.
I like NTFS because of its robust nature, not because I want speed. FAT and FAT32, when freshly defragged, are both faster than NTFS for most real-world application startup and data reading chores. NTFS performance just degrades less rapidly with file system fragmentation. If I wanted to play games primarily, I'd go with FAT on small partitions. I'd consider FAT32 if there was a need for larger partitions and needed the highest speed I could get. But if my data and staying operational meant everything to me, I'd stick with NTFS. Since my migration to the Windows world, I've used mostly notebooks as my personal machines. They're very different animals from the servers and workstations I work on. I think the 4,096 byte cluster is the most effective compromise for most NTFS partitions on smaller drives, especially those on notebooks. It's the largest cluster that supports compression. That way I get the advantage of the largest cluster size possible, but reap the benefits of compression. But I'd use larger clusters for large drives and for certain RAID arrays, to optimize data transfer speeds.
My $.02 in a nutshell.
Regards,
Jim
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