In Neal at Spectdar Computing
I've been selling Windows since Windows 286. Since Xp came out
I've
been using diskpart to format to a 2048 cluster size. It's half
the
default, wastes little space and seems just a tad quicker. I'd
love
to know what other system builders are doing in that area.
Using a smaller cluster size results in more clusters, and
therefore I/O and slower access, not faster.
Regarding its wasting little space, sspecially in these days of
very inexpensive hard drives, worrying about a small difference
in waste due to the amount of slack is counterproductive.
The total amount of slack on your drive is roughly half the
cluster size times the number of files. Even if one has as many
as 500,000 files, that's 500,000,000 bytes of slack for 2048-byte
clusters, and 1GB for 4K clusters. So the savings with 2048-byte
clusters is 1/2 of a GB (probably less, because most people won't
have as many as 500,000 files).
These days hard drives sell for $1 US per GB, or less. I saw an
ad a few days ago for a 160GB drive on sale for $40, or $.25 a
GB. The savings by using the smaller clusters is a few pennies
worth of disk space. For almost everyone, that's insignificant;
far better to worry about the performance implications of smaller
clusters. 4K is a much better cluster size than 2048 bytes.
