Vista NTFS - Is there a "best" cluster size for gaming?

[Joeygates]

Subject pretty much says it all. I just picked up a pretty nice seagate 500gb hard drive and I hadn't thought about the cluster size. Im looking around and there's nothing really conclusive. I always usually go with the default but I assume for gaming, a bigger cluster size is better?

Actually, while we're at it, what would be the best for a swap disk, gaming, and storage?

I assume for storage the smaller the better.

Thanks in advance,
Joe

 

[Nothinman]

Depends on the average size of the file, the larger the cluster size the more wasted space when a small file doesn't fill the whole thing. Speed-wise I really doubt you'll notice the difference.

 

[Joeygates]

Eh, I dunno about that. I don't remember what it was but I found benchmarks a year or so ago for this stuff and I do recall that there were some settings that made streaming games (i.e. warcraft) and load times better.

For storage if I recall correctly, they said the lower the better but if you go down too low the space gain is not worth the performance loss. I just don't remember what the thresholds were and it seems that benchmark is nowhere to be found.

 

[pallejr]

If you keep the drive defragmented it shouldn't matter. Windows operates with 4K pages, so having 4K clusters on the partition where the pagefile resides might give something

 

[sutahz]

By Joeygates:
"Im looking around and there's nothing really conclusive."
" found benchmarks a year or so ago for this stuff and I do recall that there were some settings that made streaming games (i.e. warcraft) and load times better"

Which is it?

 

[taltamir]

I did benchmarks with RAID5 in software mode and found significant differences, but that is because it is raid5 in software mode (really, REALLY, bad...)

In regular operation it should be minimal. Why don't you just test it out yourself? format, run disk benchmark, format at different setting, run disk benchmark, repeat.

This will give you an accurate idea of what to expect from the specific hardware YOU have, rather then trying to stipulate how it will perform on your computer based on tests done on completely different systems.

The point of review sites is that they compare DIFFERENT HARDWARE. To compare it yourself you would have to buy thosands of dollars worth of hardware and spend some time conducting tests. For this quantry you need to spend 0$, just do the tests...

 

[python3k]

The test you suggest seemed like a good idea, but the problem is that the I/O speed of games depend on the gamefiles themselves while testing software use their own testdata.

If there's testing software that gives us the possibility to choose the size of the testdata (e.g. data sizes similar to those used by games), it would provide us with much more relevant test results.

 

[Nothinman]

Any I/O benchmark tool worth using will let you specify the size of the dataset.

 

[scruffypup]

The cluster size in NTFS in today's harddrives really will not have any kind of real world benefits whatsoever. The cluster size by default is 4kb. If the system was running a harddrive on fat32 and smaller harddrives, the cluster size would be smaller by default,.. and more overhead per cluster when transmitting that data when called for.

If you are running win95, win98 or winME and using a smaller harddrive,... 2GB range, then you would see a performance increase with larger clusters than say 512 bytes which was common. If you move that to 4KB you would see higher data transfer rates in "burst mode" but would waste more space, which was very very important consideration back in win98 era with say a 4-16GB drive.

In today's world, on NTFS, huge harddrives (at least in comparison to then, maybe not tomorrow), quicker interfaces (instead of ide66, eide100, eide133, now sata I and II typical), there really won't be any real world benefit to cluster size. I should say it is a benefit as long as you don't decrease it.

In other words,... no reason to mess with it. Partitioning used to have some possible performance increases as well in certain situations,... not really true with today's hardware as well. Some of these things applied when hardware was fairly slow in comparison,...

 

[firewolfsm]

Changing cluster size to the maximum makes most users lose about 100MB-1GB of hard drive space. It's not much really.