New hard drive and 64k blocks

[pthomas745]

Dead hard drive, new install of Sage. I use an HD-200 plugged into the server. I have a really simple setup, just mostly watch and record TV with two Hauppauge 1650's. No comskip, just a couple of the nicer interface plugins.

The old hard drive was a 500MB SATA. One smaller partition for the XP Pro, and a large partition for Sage recordings.

This time, I'll install two hard drives.

Does Sage still recommend 64K block size in recording drives? I read the Sage Manual (V7) for this and compared it to V6 of the manual, and 64k block sizes aren't mentioned. Since hard drive space is so cheap these days, is 64K just a good way to go to help Sage handle recordings and playback?

And, should the drive with the OS also be formatted in 64K blocks?

[GKusnick]

It's a video buffering issue. 64K blocks were recommended in V6 and earlier to ensure that there was always enough video buffered to cover the seek time between blocks. V7 handles buffering better so that 64K blocks aren't needed anymore.

You definitely do not want to format your OS drive in 64K blocks, since that will result in a lot of wasted space for smaller files. Yes, disk space is cheap, but wasted space reduces disk performance by spreading out the useful data over a bigger area of the disk instead of keeping it all close together.

[Audacity]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

It's a video buffering issue. 64K blocks were recommended in V6 and earlier to ensure that there was always enough video buffered to cover the seek time between blocks. V7 handles buffering better so that 64K blocks aren't needed anymore

Maybe those Tips and Tricks should be updated if the 64k cluster thing isn't going to help video playback performance.

[pthomas745]

Thank you so much for the quick response.

Sage Forums are the best...because there are so many experts here.

Ok....I'm off to rebuild my server.....Having withdrawals from having to watch live TV without Sage!!!

[Beefcake550]

I still recommend formatting the sagetv drive to 64k clusters.....it just makes sense.

[MattHelm]

Originally Posted by Beefcake550

I still recommend formatting the sagetv drive to 64k clusters.....it just makes sense.

Me too.

[stevech]

I don't get why the 64KB recommendation is withdrawn. Doesn't this simply reduce the number of Windows NTFS I/Os required? And thus much less overhead? Though Windows may do larger buffering and read-ahead, getting the data from buffers to the application (Sage) in 4KB chunks seems inefficient.

[GKusnick]

Allocation block size and I/O buffer size are two different concepts. Just because the block size is 4K doesn't mean the OS can't transfer larger units if they happen to be consecutive. What changed in V7 is that it does a better job of allocating consecutively for small block sizes.