Hello everyone, I need an advice. I have a 1TB hdd with two partitions, one with 260GB (system partition) and one 700GB for data store. Now I need to format the data partition (D) but I'm unsure about the size of clusters to be set. A friend says that the hdd used to store data and large files such as video content, RAR files, MP3 etc, it is better to format them with larger size of clusters (eg. 16 / 32kb) because the read/write performance are improved. What do you think about?...which cluster size is optimal for data partition?
I tested a 640 GB partition with 4 KB and later 64 KB clusters. Files up to 10 GB in size were used. Subjectively there was no difference in performance. Image/restore times of the 10 GB image were the same. On my 2 TB HDs I use the default cluster size. (4 KB)
In modern systems, with all their buffering, speed differences stemming from cluster size differences is minimal. My recommendation is to use the default unless you have an overwhelming quantity of either huge files or tiny files and wish to avoid excess slack. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/140365
With the amount of caching and read/write ordering , most modern operating systems will negate most performances losses due to cluster sizing differences in any situation where you are not I/O bound for majority of your time.
First of all thank you very much for the explanations. So not worth complicate our life to understand which is the optimal size of clusters.... However I realized that in modern systems the speed differences stemming from cluster size differences is minimal, but I think if the clusters are larger,the system takes less time to format, to defrag, to index, etc. the hdd units.... right or not?
