Cluster size on destination disk?

I'm using TI8 (yes, I know)

I have been successfully imaging my hard disk to an external drive (over FireWire 400).

I now want to image the hard disk to another external drive (one I have just bought).

I want to initialise my new external disk optimally, so my questions are:
a) does it matter what cluster size (4K to 64K) I use for the new external disk?
b) can TI8 image my hard disk to the external disk, regardless of its cluster size (my internal hard disk has the default 4k clusters)?
c) what's the best cluster size to use of the external disk, for speed of imaging?

TIA


I
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Usually best to fornat as NTFS with default NTFS cluster size (usually 4096 bytes)

 

Thanks for your reply.

Why is the default cluster size of 4k best?

Most of the files that I will store on this disk are over 200Kb (audio samples etc) and TI8 image files. So loss of disk space at the end of the cluster is not an issue.

I am rather hoping to getter better disk performance with fewer disk "seeks" happening if the clusters are bigger.

 

If you do a Google search on the topic you will see warnings about some utilities not working properly with cluster sizes above 4K. One of my rules of computing is to use the defaults wherever possible since you can be sure this is the value used the most when various applications and hardware are tested.
I'm not certain about this but there were some posts several months ago which gave me the impression that TI will reset the cluster size on a restore. Acronis or somebody more knowledgeable than I will have to confirm or deny that bit of info.
If you are worried about seektime, I would think you might be much better off running a good defrag program. What you want to mimimize is seeks to different cylinders, not so much as to how big the pieces are.

 

Buffer size is the thing that matters for reducing disk seeks.
For example, try the programs at http://www.standards.com/index.html?ReadFile
and the Content program (released yesterday) at http://www.standards.com/index.html?CompareDrivesUsingfileContent.

For the latter, take note of the discussion on choosing buffer size.

 

Hello DarkStar,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please have a look at this thread it should answer your question.

Thank you.
--
Aleksandr Isakov