Drive Cluster Size...

[Meractik]

in order to gain the most space and efficiency when reading/writing a drive depending on the size is it always most efficient to allow windows to select the default cluster size? or would it be better to manually select when formatting..?

 

[V00D00]

depends on your files. If you have a lot of big files on your drive larger clusters will give you better performance and better drive size utilization. If you have many small files then it's better to have smaller clusters.

If you have a 3k file on your drive and 4k cluster size, than 1k of that is wasted. If you have 1,000 of those 3k files then you're losing 1,000k of space.

If you have a bunch of 2gb files and a 32kb cluster size then your drive will be able to read the larger clusters much more quickly, and you will get better performance if the files aren't very fragmented.

 

[Meractik]

my file sizes vary, whats the default cluster size in win2k? i could probably gain a little performance boost by making my OS partition have 4k cluster size while my other partitions with larger files on them a bigger cluster size...

 

[MetalStorm]

Originally posted by: Meractik
my file sizes vary, whats the default cluster size in win2k? i could probably gain a little performance boost by making my OS partition have 4k cluster size while my other partitions with larger files on them a bigger cluster size...

Benchmarkable performance? Maybe. Actual noticeable performance? Doubtful.

If you have the time then you might as well, but the default of 4k is fine. It's a little different with RAID stripes, but still the actual difference in performance is slim.