How many bytes per allocation unit?!

[karna]

Hi -

I have this new 30GB HD that I partitioned into 3. When I formatted it with Seagate's superb software, I chose to adjust the amount of bytes per allocation unit to 512. Unfortunately, this is now worrying me because scandisk takes forever and i'm concerned that defrag will take a couple days.
My boot drive is about 7.8GB, with around 14 million allocation units.
Could I increase my performance by changing it to 4KB or 8KB per unit?
I thought I wanted to save space but now I realize with all this space that's silly.

also does anyone know a good website that goes into Hard drives fanatically.
Thanks,

K

 

[hominid skull]

try http://www.storagereview.com/

It's always a trade off between speed and space saved by the smaller allocation units on the disk. 4K-8K is a good size, my 8 gig hard idsk is fat32 with 4K allocation units. With a 30gig hard disk your not going to miss the space.

 

[karna]

nice nickname there.

Thanks loads for the URL and info.

I'm going to reformat in DOS(if I can find the command to tell it what size to make the units) before i install any more software.

cya

k

 

[medic]

Default cluster size:


.256 - 8.01G---4KB

8.02 - 16.02G---8KB

16.03 - 32.04G---16KB

Above 32.04G---32KB