Cluster Size

[Guest]

bytes in each allocation unit.
What is the recommended size of a system drive?
I am looking for the most optimal cluster size to format my system drive with.
It is currently 512b... should I change that to 4KB?
This for an IIS server and SQL server.

 

[David H. Lipman]

From: "Allan" <[email protected]>

| bytes in each allocation unit.
| What is the recommended size of a system drive?
| I am looking for the most optimal cluster size to format my system drive with.
| It is currently 512b... should I change that to 4KB?
| This for an IIS server and SQL server.

Leave it at the OS default.

 

[Dave Patrick]

For general use 4 kb clusters which is the default.

--
Regards,

Dave Patrick ....Please no email replies - reply in newsgroup.
Microsoft Certified Professional
Microsoft MVP [Windows]
http://www.microsoft.com/protect

:
| bytes in each allocation unit.
| What is the recommended size of a system drive?
| I am looking for the most optimal cluster size to format my system drive
with.
| It is currently 512b... should I change that to 4KB?
| This for an IIS server and SQL server.
|

 

[Colon Terminus]

One wonders how cluster size got set to sector size. Was it converted to
NTFS from FAT?

At any rate, the optimum cluster size would most likely be 4096. 512 byte
clusters are just downright awful for IIS and SQL.

 

[Guest]

I truely appreciate your answers all.
"At any rate, the optimum cluster size would most likely be 4096. 512 byte
clusters are just downright awful for IIS and SQL."

Is there anywhere I can find performance impact facts about the above
statements?

Thanks,
Allan

 

[Colon Terminus]

Although not empirical data, here's an excerpt from an article published by
Executive Software (makers of Diskeeper defragmentation software) several
years ago. Unfortunately the article doesn't seem to be archived on their
website.

-----------------------

I took a 866MHz Pentium III Windows 2000 machine with a DMA-66 IDE hard
drive, and carved a 2GB volume out of the hard drive. I then created a
program which would place 5200 files of known, predicted size on that
volume, filling up the volume till it was 24% free, using all three file
systems. I recorded the number of wall-clock seconds it took to complete
the job. Here's how it came out:


- Under FAT-16, under which I could only use a 64K-byte cluster size,
the job completed in 1,682 seconds.


- Under FAT-32, with a 4K-byte cluster, the job completed in 2,472
seconds; with a 1K-byte cluster size the job completed in 3,960 seconds;
with a 512-byte cluster size the job completed in 7,860 seconds.


- Under NTFS, with a 4K-byte cluster, the job completed in 1,532
seconds; with a 1K-byte cluster size the job completed in 2,963 seconds;
with a 512-byte cluster size the job completed in 4,983 seconds."