Hard drive clusters

[DaveWC]

Somewhere in the install of SageTV it mentioned that it was preferable to format your hd with 64kb clusters. I'm running Vista and when I installed the OS it formatted the drive on its own. So I don't know what cluster size it used. I was adding an HD to my system and when I go to format it has the cluster size set to default, but offers the choice of cluster size. So I assume that it used default for the first drive as well. I believe the actual cluster size used by default depends on the hd size. Both drives are 1TB. Is there a way to find out what was used? Should I start over & reinstall & set it to 64kb? I can easily do that for the 2nd drive. (I know, I used default rather then 64kb). Will this affect performance to a degree that I'll have to do it later?

[sainswor99]

For $50 you can buy a copy of Acronis Disk Director Suite, which will allow you to do all sorts of things (including formatting with 64K clusters); it'll also allow you to resize partitions without formatting.

You could then set up a partition for the OS formatted at the default level, and the set up a Media partition for videos at the 64K cluster. Note that larger clusters can be detrimental to the performance of your hard drive when dealing with smaller files, so you really only want to do it for video files.

HTH,
Stu

[carlgar]

The cluster size by default is always 4096. It is awkward but you can determine the current cluster size by using notepad to create a file with a single character in it. The use file properties to see what the size on disk is. A cluster is the min. size that a file can be. For Video files which are large files should use a cluster size of 64K. Using the default will cause the system to due 16 times more accesses than using 64k. This make cause studdering. If your drive is fast enough you may not notice the issue. It is really a matter of luck whether you see a problem or not using a small cluster size for video files. If your disk is empty then you probably will not see a problem because the data will be together. As the disk becomes full the holes will be the cluster size so it is better to have 64K together instead of 16 4k chunks of data.

[gplasky]

Go to command prompt and type chkdsk. (no switches) After it is done it will tell you what the cluster size is. Like "4096 bytes in each allocation unit" if it is 4K cluster.

Gerry

[DaveWC]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Go to command prompt and type chkdsk. (no switches) After it is done it will tell you what the cluster size is. Like "4096 bytes in each allocation unit" if it is 4K cluster.

Thanks. That did it. My newest 1TB drive is set for 64k and the original drive C is 4k. I guess I can shrink the size of drive C and reformat the unused part with 64k clusters.

[sleeeves]

There's a command that will return results without having to wait for chkdsk to run.

At a command prompt, type this: fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo c:

Of course change c: to whatever drive you want to check...

[CollinR]

Only the video storage needs to be 64k, the windows partion and most other partitions need not be.