Allocation Unit Size...wth

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q314878

"The smaller the cluster size, the more efficiently your disk stores information."

BUT

"The following table shows the default values that Windows XP uses for NTFS formatting.

Drive size
(logical volume) --- Cluster size --- Sectors
----------------------------------------------------------
512 MB or less -- 512 bytes -- 1
513 MB - 1,024 MB (1 GB)-- 1,024 bytes (1 KB) -- 2
1,025 MB - 2,048 MB (2 GB)-- 2,048 bytes (2 KB) -- 4
2,049 MB and larger -- 4,096 bytes (4 KB) -- 8 "




--------I'm pretty sure also in original Windows XP installs (through the disk) it uses those same default values. There must be some way to use smaller values than default (I have an 80GB drive). If they say a lower cluster size is more desirable, then why in hell would they default to the largest one? Anyway know if this is correct or if there is a work around?

You can always boot from a PEBuilder CD and preformat your harddisk partition with whatever clustersize you want.

Having smaller clusters is not "better". It's a tradeoff between speed and wasted space on end of files: The bigger the clusters, the faster the disk since the administration overhead is smaller. On the other side, the wasted space per file also increases. On average the wasted space is half the clustersize per file.

So if you have many big files (a disk for videofiles only), then use big clusters. If you have many small files, use small clusters.

Read that a little more closely and you may notice that FAT formatting uses much larger clusters and covers over 10 times the drive sector area's for a similar sized HDD compared to NTFS.

If you want to try a smaller cluster size you can format (not using install disk) using command line for tests. But I'll bet MS has worked out the best arrangement for this in a modern OS. Would be interesting to see what it does however.

alrighty, thanks guys