Optimum Block Size in BIOS for KT7-100 Raid configuration?

[DanL]

One of the BIOS configuration choices for the KT7-100 is Block Size; 4K, 8K, 16K, 32K or 64K.
What is optimum for the user employing nominal home applications and games?
Are optimum settings for KT7-100 BIOS posted anywhere?
Thanks.

 

[The Stigenator]

32 or 64.. I guess..

 

[Quaggoth]

Depends on what you are going for. 4K for efficiency, 64K for speed. I would use 16K myself, and as soon as I get my KT7-RAID, I will be.

 

[xtreme2k]

bigger blocks are faster generally

use 64K

 

[Barny]

Don't know if optimum settings are posted anywhere but I agree with Quaggoth.
Consider this:
If you take a look at the file size of a typical home pc you'll find hundreds of files that are 1k in size. You'll find hundreds more that are less than 4k and thousands that are less than 64k.
The smallest block size you can choose is 4k. So each of those 1k files is actually taking up 1 block of disk space. Windows doesn't store 4-1k files in a 4k block, 3k is waisted. For 64k block sizes, 63k is waisted. So, the block size you choose has an effect on the overall storage capacity of your hard drive.
Choosing a 4k block in a raid configuration allows files of 4k or less to be read off of a single drive, speeding up data access. A file larger than 4k may slow things down because you may have to wait for 1 of the 2 (or more) disk drives to seek and retrieve the data. One of them may be busy with another operation when the read request is issued.
Defining a block size of 8, 16, 32 or 64 speeds up access because smaller files can be retrieved from a single disk. But you sacrifice true disk capacity when you do this.
For optimum capacity (as Quaggoth states) choose 4k.
For optimum speed choose 64k.
For somewhere in between choose 8, 16, or 32.

 

[progiciel]

There's something I don't understand, and forgive my ignorance: you can create 64k blocks at the RAID level, and format your drives with, say, 4k blocks (FAT32, for example). Will you be wasting any space at all? The allocation will be done at the OS level (4k blocks), therefore not wasting much space. How it works at the RAID level, I don't know though. Can you shed any light on this?

 

[xtreme2k]

i have seen benchmarks showing 64K blocks are better than 32 and 16

forgot the links

 

[progiciel]

Thanks for the clarification; does that mean then that if I'm using win98 with the default 4k FAT32 allocation, and with Partition Magic or other tool I resize the clusters to, say, 16k, I should see my performance increase?

Thanks again!