NTFS cluster allocation unit size – larger than 4 KB?

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Now that disks are getting bigger and bigger, can anyone see any good reason to format an NTFS partition using anything other than the default 4 KB size (above 16 TB the default size goes up to 8 KB, above 32 TB -> 16 KB, and so on…)?

The Exchange 2007 chaps suggest that for “Exchange databases” you should use a cluster allocation size of 64 KB, but I haven’t seen must to indicate whether this has any significant effect on Exchange 2007 performance, or on that of any other program.

Has anyone used anything other than the default 4 KB?

BATcher

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Has anyone used anything other than the default 4 KB?

Not me, but this article suggests that a larger cluster size is only ‘appropriate’ with larger files…

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Now that disks are getting bigger and bigger, can anyone see any good reason to format an NTFS partition using anything other than the default 4 KB size (above 16 TB the default size goes up to 8 KB, above 32 TB -> 16 KB, and so on…)?

No, but I think it must depend on what the disk is used as; system drive etc.

I agree with Leif; from my perspective it all depends on what you are going to do with disk. One of these days all drives are going to be what we called very large just some year ago (true every year…), but we are still mostly using them as usual; perhaps with one significant exception: very large media files, movies. Then, of course, companies build large databases.

As you know there have been some discussions before. I’ll quote what I said somewhere else ([post=”534216″]Post 534216[/post]):
If anyone thinks that they will get less slack, wasted disk space, with a smaller cluster size that might be true, but they have to consider performance. With a smaller cluster size multiple data must be read, instead of fewer, larger clusters.

If we put that the other way around; larger clusters for the really big files is good performance, but on a system disk?

Has anyone used anything other than the default 4 KB?

No I have not used anything other than the default 4 KB on Windows XP; but before that it was a different matter as you know.

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