RAID stripe size and windows9x/2000 default Cluster Size

[CyNics]

Okay. I'm trying to setup a RAID in my system. Everything is ready now except this raid stripe size and windows9x/2000 cluster size thing.
Are they related to each other ? If I selected 16kb for my raid stripe size, and then formatted my drives using Fdisk(windows9x) and windows 2000 installer (windows2000), what would be the cluster size for my windows9x and win2k ? I know for a normal windows 2000 installation (no RAID), the default cluster size is 4kb for a partition larger than 2gb. What is this RAID stripe size for by the way ?
Thanks.

 

[cbuchach]

Cluster and stripe size are two completely different things. Stripe size is defined when you create your RAID array. Your OS doesn't know and doesn't care what the stripe size is, that is for the RAID BIOS to deal with.

When creating a partition and fomatting, the stripe size has absolutely NO impact on what the default cluster size is. The OS will not and really cannot access the info regarding what the stripe size is. If you are going to be creating an NTFS volume, go ahead and use the default 4KB cluster size. Some have advocated trying to match the cluster size to a multiple of the stripe size, but I have found no performance differences when trying that method. Typically, using larger cluster sizes will give you modestly improved benchmarks, but will also greatly increase waste as the cluster size is increased. If you are creating a FAT32 partition, again use the default cluster size.

As for determining optimal stripe sizes when you create your array, Anand did a good comparison with a few commonly used controllers here.