ntfs

[nymph4]

I have win7 and use ntfs on it.

Now I got a 500 GB hard drive for just Backingup videos and music and graphics.
It plugs in usb and I format it as ntfs as well.

But I made the clustr size 64 kB in size.

I did this because I was told years ago if you use ntfs on drive C: wilth win7 the cluster size will be 4kB by default.

But when you use ntfs on a drive for stoage you sould make cluster size big 64kB because files you are storing will be very big.

Am I doing things right?

[patio]

The default cluster sizes for NTFS are fine...go with that.
This stopped being a performance issue when HDD's got over 1G insize.

[Calum]

I agree with patio, the difference in performance between cluster sizes is basically unnoticeable with modern HDDs.  In theory if you use larger files you should use a larger cluster size, but benchmarks have shown the differences to be negligible.

[BC_Programmer]

higher cluster sizes have never changed performance anyway. They were different sizes in FAT because FAT and FAT32 and limits on the total number of clusters and the cluster size scaled up for larger drives  so the space could be used within that limit.

The read operations are not faster because the data is still read in the same way. in one case the 128KB file is said to be at such and such position and takes up 32 clusters, and if you have 8KB clusters it takes up 16. the HD still needs to read a total of 128KB anyway, and clusters don't affect how that data is read (it doesn't read them cluster by cluster, or anything like that).


The Cluster Size is mostly a concern for slack space- smaller is always better. Every piece of data has to use some integral number of clusters. with 4KB clusters, 6KB of data uses 2 clusters and a total of 8KB of space, with 2KB slack. if that 6KB of data is stored on a drive with a 32KB cluster size, it will use 32 KB of space.