[Solved] Bunch of Hard Drive Questions

Hi, I just had a few hard drive questions, becuase I couldn't find any answer after searching all over the internet.

-When windows xp installs itself, it automatically makes the sectors or blocks or clusters or whatever you want to call them on the hard drive 4kb. I was wondering, is there anyway to resize the clusters or install windows with larger clusters like 64kb?

-What are the largest size sector/block/cluster that Windows XP supports?

-What is the largest sector/block/cluster cluster that Windows 7 supports?

-Whats the largest sector size that NTFS supports?

-Please tell me how to resize so that my whole drive is on larger clusters, I dont care if I need to reformat and reinstall my OS or if i can do it without reinstalling, I just want to find a way how to do it.

-Thank you for any instructions on how to do this, because all online ways give undetailed explanations or offer trial applications to do it. Please provide a detailed way of doing this for windows xp and how big i can make my clusters because I heard that 64k was the largest but not sure, please clarify for me.

-If you are curious why i want to do this then here is your answer: I am well aware that sectors are seen as either full or empty and can only fit 1 file so in would be really inefficient because I could lose lots of space on my hard drive, however, I have a 250GB Hard Drive and I currently only a little bit over 30GB. Most of my files are pretty large so I wont lose much space anyway and I have plenty of it to spare, however I heard doing this will increase performance so I want to try and see for myself. And yes I am well aware that compression will be disabled but I never use it so I dont care about that.

-Thank You.

attach the HDD to another machine and format it to the desired block size. when you install(OS), choose the partition that you created.

but the bigger question is why?(your answer makes no sense to me) it is not wise to try to muck with the c:, it is better to create another partion that meets your needs. most applications are not written to read and write at such large block size. the only reason for making such block sizes would be to house a 1-2 TB SQL database and you don't want to use GPT. (also SQL writes at 4k, Exchange reads at 32k) find out at what block size your application reads and writes at, then tune.

64k is the largest block, this is a function of NTFS. not the OS. we were promised a new file system with vista, but was put to the side as it was rushed.

some times defaults are defaults for a reason.

"I agree with the other posters that you're unlikely to see much, if any difference in performance."
^Well lets leave that to me in order to decide , I just want to try it out, I am curious person and I really like to experiment with things like these. I am still very young and just trying to learn and see for myself.

-Oh and thanks for the replies, i cannot believe myself I did not think of something so simple like this.

^Thank you, I already have everything back-up so I can just do it whenever I feel like it, most likely on the weekend but maybe today, just gotta get my hard drive out and connect it as slave to my other PC to format it

Check out Highpoint's RAID controllers:

http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA/series_4300.htm
http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA/series_3500.htm

I believe they do permit enlarged clusters
e.g. to allow partitions larger than 2TB under XP x32.

Look for this phrase in their product data sheets:

"64bit LBA support greater than 2TB per volume"

-and-

"64bit LBA for over 2TB partition support"

-and-

"VSS (Variable Sector Size) for over 2TB single volume in 32 bit OS"

There is a Windows RAID Management program which is
described in the RocketRAID 3120 User Manual as follows:

Enable VSS (Variable Sector Size) and MAID (Spindown Idle Disk):

The RR3120 already support both features in BIOS and drivers.

VSS is supported in Windows XP and Win2000 only. If users want over 2TB single
volume in XP or Win2000 they need to use the VSS feature to support it.

Variable Sector Size (VSS) Values

512B - RAID storage is greater than 2 Terabyte
1K - RAID storage is greater than 4 Terabyte
2K - RAID storage is greater than 8 Terabyte
4K - RAID storage is greater than 16 Terabyte

MRFS

The firmware in an SSD goes to a lot of trouble to map "logical" 512-byte sectors into flash memory pages dynamically so that writes to the same logical sector don't always go to the same physical page. This is known as "wear levelling" and it's important because flash memory devices have a limited number of write cycles before they die.

There's no technical reason one couldn't write the firmware to use a different logical sector size, but I strongly doubt that any manufacturer has actually done it. The industry has pretty much settled on 512 bytes and there seems to be hardly any demand for anything else.

-Yes you would.

Glad you did it, but you might wanna check where your system files are. If you did as you have stated it is possible that your system files are on another drive with default cluster size and if something happens to that drive then you cannot boot up your OS