NTFS cluster size

[Michael]

What is the best cluster size for a 40 Gb hard disk on NTFS for general use
(some videos, games, pictures, simple accounts files).

TIA

Mike

 

[Carey Frisch [MVP]]

4kb

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows - Shell/User
Microsoft Community Newsgroups
news://msnews.microsoft.com/

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| What is the best cluster size for a 40 Gb hard disk on NTFS for general use
| (some videos, games, pictures, simple accounts files).
|
| TIA
|
| Mike
|
|
|
|

 

[Larry Samuels]

4096 bytes--it is the native cluster size for NTFS because windows pages in
4k chunks.

--
Larry Samuels Associate Expert
MS-MVP (2001-2005)
Unofficial FAQ for Windows Server 2003 at
http://pelos.us/SERVER.htm
Expert Zone-

 

[S.Sengupta]

'The maximum default cluster size under Windows XP is 4 kilobytes (KB)
because NTFS file compression is not possible on drives with a larger
allocation size.'
Ref:-http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314878/

regards,
S.Sengupta[MS-MVP]

 

[Vanguard]

What is the best cluster size for a 40 Gb hard disk on NTFS for
general use
(some videos, games, pictures, simple accounts files).

If you change the default cluster size, you could screw over your NTFS
partition if you use 3rd party tools to resize, move, or merge
partitions. Leave it be. You aren't running a file server with
hundreds of users concurrently connected.

 

[cquirke (MVP Windows shell/user)]

4096 bytes--it is the native cluster size for NTFS because windows pages in
4k chunks.

If converting a mis-aligned FATxx volume to NTFS, you may be stuck
with 512-byte (i.e. one sector per cluster) cluster size. This can
really slow things down, and even for lots of small files, it's still
likely to be a bad idea (given that NTFS can incorporate small file
data within the expanded metadata space, so you may not see any
meaningful reduction in slack space wastage)

Otherwise I'd agree; 4k for C: in particular, YMMV on other volumes
where you want to store material that is unlikely to be paged.

Having said that, I'd feel more comfy with whatever NTFS's default may
be for that volume size, just in case some disk-level process assumes
the default and might thus mess up a non-default volume.

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[Ken Blake, MVP]

What is the best cluster size for a 40 Gb hard disk on NTFS for
general use (some videos, games, pictures, simple accounts files).

4K is both the default and what's best.