[Michael]

I have heard that the bigger the clusters on a hard drive the faster it works. Is this true? I don't use much of my hard drive so space is not a problem and will make them a lot bigger if it will make my computer a bit faster.

Edited by Michael Buckley, 11 August 2005 - 08:00 PM.

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If your using NTFS (4) ..no it wont be faster but it will fragment your windows drive (partition) faster.

Fat32 does benefit..say 8 or 16bit cluster size..I wouldnt go much higher than that...

[OneCool]

If your using NTFS (4) ..no it wont be faster but it will fragment your windows drive (partition) faster.

Fat32 does benefit..say 8 or 16bit cluster size..I wouldnt go much higher than that...

[warriorscot]

Yeah, if you are talking about RAID set ups then it will make a difference, but you generally want to have it set mid way as there are disadvantages as well. But otherwise as one cool said.

[OneCool]

Yeah, if you are talking about RAID set ups

I was talking about single drive setups..

my fault

[Michael]

Thanks for the reply. I only have one hard drive with Ntfs partitions so I won't do it. Warriorscot you said that there are disadvantages as well, besides the waisted space what is the disadvantage.

[warriorscot]

I was only adding in the RAID as you had allready covered the single drives one cool.
As one cool says it will cause a higher degree of fragmentation and working with smaller files for normal non gaming use can be more difficult. You can get more details if you google it, been a while since i read the last article on the cluster size. It mostly evident when you use RAID in NTFS its not going to affect performance much other than causing defragmentation.

[Michael]

So should I make the clusters smaller to help stop defragmentation? I am not conserned about games being slow not haveing any that are very good. I am off to Googel now but would like to know that you think.

[warriorscot]

Leave it the way it is, if it aint broke dont fix it.

[Michael]

If it aint broke, break it or make it better.

I am not that conserved about data lose (five partitions and a complete back up with Notron Goast makes me not conserned) I have is a 4KB what would be the best.

I am reading a few things from Google fight now.

Edited by Michael Buckley, 12 August 2005 - 05:32 PM.

[Michael]

A quote from a web page that I read.

"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."

www.tweakxp.com/article37042.aspx

Is this true? If so I am going to make the cluser size a lot bigger on some paritions (on one parition the average files size is 20mb so it might be worth the change.)

Edited by Michael Buckley, 12 August 2005 - 09:50 PM.