formatting NTFS (for primary) -> what cluster size?

[Marin85]

I want to format my 7K200 to set up Win 7 on it, so I was wondering what cluster sizes to choose to optimize the file system performance. Some folks suggest to pick the biggest in order to achieve better throughput for larger files. Anything else to consider? In how far does it affect file system seek times? What would an estimated space waste with setting larger clusters be like? Any opinions are appreciated. (FYI, I have always used the default 4k bytes so far.)

Thanks in advance,

Marin

[bloodparrot]

It is generally known as bigger the cluster size better the performance but more space waste. Some say if cluster size increase distance between cluster increase so longer it takes to read.. but I feel that this would be negligible.. bigger cluster size will perform better as there will be less number of clusters to address or index. Speed of seek time will be affected more by fragment state of the files rather.

Size of cluster will have more impact on wasted space of the partition. If you use bigger clusters, say - 64K, on average you will lose 32K for every single file (take normalisation - with more number of files it is likely that the average will be somewhere in the middle).
On primary partition (I guess you mean c: where system is) there are hundreds or even thousands of files. If you do the calculation you will see how much space you will be wasting.

This is why small cluster size is used on systems and lager size is used on a media partition where relatively small number (compared to system) of larger sized files are.

If you have big size hard disk like 500GB or more and all you do is web surfing then I guess you can use larger cluster sizes at the cost of space but I'm not sure how much improvment will be achieved compare to the smaller size because as I mentioned earlier it will be the state of fragmentation which will affect the speed more.

[RealBlackStuff]

I think I gave up worrying about cluster size after HDs of 30GB and larger came out.
With today's sizes of 1TB and more, who gives a d a m n?

[jdhurst]

I have never seen anyone worry about cluster size with NTFS, and Microsoft discourages mucking about with it. Cluster size changes died with FAT, and to be most blunt, FAT should never have been born (insecure and easily corrrupted).
... JDH

[Marin85]

Oh, I didn´t know all that, reading a few articles about cluster sizes and windows XP/Vista NTFS performance, I though this thing might be still relevant. Thanks for you replies!

BTW, Win 7 doesn´t want to install on anything different from 4K anyway, so I guess the topic is finished now.

Thanks again,

Marin