Cluster Sizes

[Phil]

Installing W2K on a 30G C partition in a server that has a
scsi controller that uses 64k clusters, what is the best
setting for the W2K cluster size? How do these differing
cluster size setting work together?
Kind Regards
Phil

 

[Bjorn Landemoo]

Phil

I suppose that you with cluster size do not mean allocation unit size, but
rather stripe size (also called block size) of a hardware RAID controller.
For allocation unit size, this MS Knowledge Base article explains more
about it, and tells you what the default sizes are:

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=140365

I would suggest that you keep the default allocation unit size of 4kB.

In a RAID array, a large file is split up in stripes of (usually) 64kB, and
distributed out to the disks. When accessed, 64kB is read from each disk.
If you have a lot of small files a stripe size less than 64kB might lead to
slightly better performance, and with large files larger stripe size might
be better.

Best regards

Bjorn