Video Drive

[viperdiablo]

Looking to add a bigger hard drive for my movie collection. I am just wondering if this drive should be formatted with 64k clusters?

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by viperdiablo

Looking to add a bigger hard drive for my movie collection. I am just wondering if this drive should be formatted with 64k clusters?

If the data on the drive isn't going to experience constant deletions / additions like a recordings drive then it isn't as necessary; however, going 64k will mean less movement of the heads (thrashing) and so I still recommend 64k (you are only talking a very small percentage of lost space so the benefits outweigh the negatives)

[gplasky]

So on my WHS server I had enough space on the D drive (4K) to actually put ripped movies on there. They work fine. The rest are on 64k drives and I can't tell the difference when either one plays.

Gerry

[viperdiablo]

I formatted a 1tb drive with 64k clusters. The final result is 931gb of free space. How much space would there of been if I did not do 64k?

[S_M_E]

I don't know how much more space it would have but I'd still want 64K clusters for my Sage media. I got away with 4k clusers for a long time but my usage is light. With the cost per gigabyte today, cluster size vs free space really should be a non-issue. Back when a 100M drive cost more than a 1T drive today, cluster size mattered more.

[Opus4]

On a freshly formatted drive, the free space shouldn't be any different if the drive is formatted at one cluster size vs. another. A 1TB drive does not format to 1 TB free space, unless hard drive makers have changed their terminology.

Drive manufacturers use 1000 bytes per K:
a 1TB drive = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes = 1000 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000

Most software uses 1024 bytes per K:
1,000,000,000,000 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 = ~ 931 GB.

- Andy

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by viperdiablo

I formatted a 1tb drive with 64k clusters. The final result is 931gb of free space. How much space would there of been if I did not do 64k?

Not much different. The only time you save space is if your drive is going to hold lots of files that are smaller than your cluster size. For example if you had tons of 1kb text files on the drive, it wouldn't make sense to format it to 64k clusters because then each file would take 63k more space than necessary.

If you're using it for media like pictures, music, and videos, that are all >>64k, then you don't gain anything by using smaller clusters.

[S_M_E]

Originally Posted by stanger89

If you're using it for media like pictures, music, and videos, that are all >>64k, then you don't gain anything by using smaller clusters.

That's only partially true. A 100K file would be more efficient using 25 4k clusters than 2 64K clusters. The head seek/drive thrashing would be less with larger clusters and less fragmentation is possible.