New hard drive, what is best cluster size?

[zaldwaik]

I obtained a new 160 GB drive and I am about to format it in NTFS for GBPVR recordings and DVD storage. What is the ideal cluster size for such setup? It will be a master drive on a secondary IDE controler. Thanks.

[wtg]

If it's going to be used exclusively for MPGs and other large files, I'd go with the largest cluster size, which I think is 4096. You'll get less fragments this way, and it should be quicker to defragment when you need to. The FAT will be smaller as well, making for quicker access.

[bgowland]

[SIZE="6"]1024[/SIZE] File Allocation Size

Don't do the default or let Windows do it. That number above it the best to use. Anything higher would be a waste..

Huh?

[wtg]

1024 File Allocation Size

Don't do the default or let Windows do it. That number above it the best to use. Anything higher would be a waste..

What's your thinking here Tipster? On a typical hard drive I might agree, but not on one with predominantly large files. A 4096 cluster size cuts the size of the FAT by 75%, making for faster access and quicker defragmenting.

On a completely defragged system you'll lose on average 1536 bytes per file (2048/file lost with 4k clusters - 512/file lost with 1k clusters), but on a drive with large files this is insignificant. (1,000 files would equate to about 1.5 meg lost, and he'll be lucky to get 100 full-length movies on a 160 GB drive.) As the file system becomes fragmented over time you get big benefits though.

Larger cluster size means fewer fragments so it's less affected by fragmentation in general, and when it finally comes time to defragment the drive, it's a much faster process.

Maybe you know something I don't, but for a drive I knew I was only going to use for big files, I'd chose 8k or 16k cluster size if Windows let me. Heck, now I'm thinking I should have searched the net to find out if I could have created clusters this big when I recently formatted my new 300 GB drive.

[wtg]

Crap, just talking about this made me realize I should have had my thinking cap on recently when I formatted my new 300 GB drive. When I created my partition Windows asked me if I wanted to let Windows determine the cluster size, showed an option of 4k, and had a choice for manual. I clicked 4k thinking this was the largest size Windows XP allowed.... wrong!!

I just realized NTFS allows the user to choose up to 64KB cluster sizes, which would give some real benefits on a drive reserved for large files, for all the reasons discussed above. Even encoded using XVID or DivX you'd be doing well to get 500 movies on a 300GB hard drive, and only waste 16meg on the larger cluster size. What's that... about 30 seconds of MPEG at high quality?

Now I gotta go find out if I can non-destructively reset my cluster size.

[wtg]

I've got a 300 Maxtor and a 320 WD, both IDE. I'd have preferred SATA but it's hard to pass up IDE when the prices are so good. The Maxtor was $80 US after rebate.