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cluster size other that 4KB on Intel SSD

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

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Most program and data files are much larger than they were when 4KB became the default value for cluster size.

I would like to know whether there is any inconvenience (other than wasting some space) in having 64KB clusters.

And what performance improvements could I expect while loading today's programs and data files.

The information found on the Internet is rather conflicting.

But Intel certainly has solid measured results.

10 REPLIES 10

I read a Intel pdf about cluster size ,it seams that the reason for the smaller size is for higher IOPS, see pdf , download.intel.com/it/Solid_State_drives_in Enterprize.pdf .

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

The referenced pdf reports of tests with workloads of various "block" sizes, but it does not compare various "cluster" sizes in e.g. NTFS.

I think after reading the pdf , the jist of it is do you want high IOPS use 4kb , If you are doing video editing use 64kb , It a choice over speed or file size.

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

There is a section (in the pdf link below) on how block sizes can influence performance, which basically confers with what the white paper and Robert are saying.

http://www.snia-europe.org/Document.nsf/A53AA71753BDD64E8825772D003E4CD3/$FILE/Performance_Benchmark...

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

The motivation for my original question is that I want to maximize the responsiveness of my W7 laptop.

So I think I have to optimize it for large program and data files being loaded, small ones will load quickly anyway.

I therefore generated my data and backup partitions to NTFS with 64KB clusters (unit=64k in diskpart parlance).

Despite many efforts, I did not succeed in changing the system partition's cluster size to anything greater than 4KB, neither before installation (diskpart), nor after installation (Partition Wizard Pro) which provides a "change cluster size" function.

The Partition Wizard Pro's error message indicated that my system contains compressed files, files which can only be held in 4KB clusters.

When I will do the next clean install, I will create a separate partition for the program files, partition which I can create with 64KB clusters.

Thank you for informing me about the alignment issue.

It turned out that my boot + system partition was not correctly aligned, even though I had used the diskpart align=1024 parameter.

I finally succeded by omitting the align= parameter, in other words, W7 does align properly without any help from the user.