Cluster Size - Formating A HDD

[VirusType2]

Finally cleared off a Samsung F1, a fast 1TB drive, and I plan to put games and applications on it. I probably will have plenty of room left over, so I was thinking I'd put large .avi files on it.

I am about to format the drive, but first I decided to do some research on a good cluster size for the drive.

can have any thing upto 64K clusters.. the performance gains are significant but you've to be really careful with the cluster size as choosing the wrong size according to your data could result in a huge loss of storage capacity.

So, from what I understand about cluster size, a larger cluster size gives better performance, but can result in lots of wasted space, but especially if you have lots of little files. Think of the clusters as containers, and if you fill 64K containers with hundreds of 1K files (like text documents), 63K will be wasted for each cluster, as it can't put more than one file in each cluster.

So, for games, which seem to have mostly large files, what do you think a good cluster size would be? I've only used the default (4K) my entire life, but the 'performance increase' is making me want to make it the full 64K.

The performance comes thew the bursts from the hard drive. by having a larger cluster size you affectivly have a larger chunk of data sent to ram rather than having to read multiple smaller chunks of the same data.

Allocation units are the granularity with which disk space will be allocated to files, so if you have a 4k allocation unit, a 1k file will be allocated 4k, and a 10k file will be allocated 12k. A smaller allocation size will give less "wasted" space, but will also be slower to access (actual data) due to increased MFT/FAT access.

Note, FYI, Windows XP does not offer more than 4K (4096 bytes) from explorer, though it is possible through Disk Management. I'm using Windows 7, and it has more choices, otherwise I probably never would have known it could go higher.

The shit I've been reading:
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source...cation+size&aq=f&aqi=&oq=&fp=e8d6ef47431c6a4a

http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_optimization.htm
http://www.tweakxp.com/article37042.aspx
http://wccftech.com/forum/hardware/...erformance-and-cluster-size-size-matters.html

Oh, here's something that throws a wrench in my plans:

As for the best cluster size with Ntfs, the answer is: the default one.

It's the size that allows defragmenting Ntfs with Xp, for instance. And Ntfs doesn't accelerate with bigger clusters, as opposed to Fat32.

Really, bro?

EDIT: you know what, I'm going to test the speeds myself and compare. I need a free HDD benchmark software...

 

[Krynn72]

Put it to 32k or 64k from what I understand. I just formatted my 1.5TB external and backed up my whole PC basically, ~800 gigs of which were video or game file backups. I don't really notice a performance increase, but im not really using the hard drive for anything that would really exemplify it so I can't say how much better it is in that regard. But yeah, I'd say go big.

Also, make a god damn super thread already, jesus. I'll bet you 20 bucks you'll have at least 4 more questions before the month is out.

 

[VirusType2]

4096 Byte Allocation:

64 KB Allocation:

Virtually identical. Hmm, that's not what I wanted. I guess I would need to benchmark the actual game.

I posted these images anyway because it highlights how performance quickly falls away once the drive is about half full.


Krynn, benchmark your velociraptor drive. http://www.hdtune.com/download.html (scroll way down and get the free version, not the Pro trial version at the top of the page.)

 

[AtomicSpark]

I never bother changing it. I always use the default.

 

[VirusType2]

Customize each disk device with the allocation unit size appropriate for the projected workload characteristics. If you can't determine the disk workload characteristics, use a smaller allocation unit size on devices that you expect to be random or read-intensive and use a larger allocation unit size for disk devices that will experience sequential and write-intensive workloads.

Seems to be an old article, but, it sounds like I should just use the default from that, as games won't be writing anything to this drive.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc751289.aspx

Hmm, I want to do this right. Mainly, I'm just trying to improve streaming performance, for games like Oblivion. Content is loaded as you run through the terrain. I remember with my old computer/old HDD, it couldn't keep up with my super fast moving character very well, so I don't want to have any problems like that this time.

Shorter loading times would be nice too.

From the capture images I posted above, obviously I can see that games that stream data from the disc would greatly benefit from being installed first, so they are at the beginning of the drive. Though, I already knew this.

Just a heads up - if interested, HD Speed seems to be the better option for benchmarking a HDD: http://www.addictivetips.com/window...st-on-your-hard-disk-usb-drive-and-cddvd-rom/

 

[Asus]

If you have a huge drive and won't be using it all for apps/files you need fast access to then another thing you can do is partition it to half or less. The first partition will be on the outside of the disk and much quicker access and improve min. transfer speed (not as much for avg or max speeds). Could still use the 2nd partition but it would be on the inner part of the disk and slower (video files don't need quick access). Just don't put apps on the 1st and files accessed by those apps on the 2nd and expect it to be quick.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157.html
You can see when they limit the 1st partition on the hitachi drive from 450gb (size of the full drive?) to 44gb then access times and min transfer rates improve a lot.