Formatting a Hard Drive for Audio Recording?

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

In this group's opinion, what is the optimum cluster size setting (or
as XP calls it, allocation unit size) when formatting a hard drive. I
have seen 32K, 64K, and some say leave it at the default of 512K.

Please excuse me if this subject has been discussed before, but I've
looked everywhere, and there are many thoughts about this. I'm just
looking for a consensus.

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

John L Rice wrote:

> <Catdaddy> wrote in message
> news:45cqq01poa1ns47op5ufsms1tsm45e68q3@4ax.com...
>
>>In this group's opinion, what is the optimum cluster size setting (or
>>as XP calls it, allocation unit size) when formatting a hard drive. I
>>have seen 32K, 64K, and some say leave it at the default of 512K.
>>
>>Please excuse me if this subject has been discussed before, but I've
>>looked everywhere, and there are many thoughts about this. I'm just
>>looking for a consensus.

> What I do is format my audio drives with NTFS and use the largest cluster
> size available. ( usually 64K. I think you might of misinterpreted the
> '512K' number, I've never seen that. I believe that WinXP defaults to 4K )

I am by no means an expert on Microsoft technology (my attitude is
that when it comes to Microsoft, ignorance is bliss), but the
information I've dug up just now indicates the NTFS is an extent-based
filesystem. Which means that the cluster size is mostly a moot
point, because in most cases the filesystem should be able notice
that you are writing out a big bunch of sequential data to a file,
so it should be able to, in effect, combine several contiguous
clusters together into one big continuous area. Or at least that
is what extent-based filesystem are supposed to be able to do.

This does, however, rely on the OS realizing that you're writing a
big stream of continuous data out to a file and figuring out that
it can make this optimization.

- Logan

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

<Catdaddy> wrote in message
news:45cqq01poa1ns47op5ufsms1tsm45e68q3@4ax.com
> In this group's opinion, what is the optimum cluster size setting (or
> as XP calls it, allocation unit size) when formatting a hard drive. I
> have seen 32K, 64K, and some say leave it at the default of 512K.

The default is 512 bytes, not 512 K. It's tiny, but frankly it does not
seem to cause many problems on modern machines. It may have been more of an
issue on old machines with small CPUs.

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

Arny,
Thanks for clearing up that bit of confusion for me!!

"Arny Krueger" <arnyk@hotpop.com> wrote in message
newsfSdncfyx6nCXzDcRVn-rQ@comcast.com...
> <Catdaddy> wrote in message
> news:45cqq01poa1ns47op5ufsms1tsm45e68q3@4ax.com
> > In this group's opinion, what is the optimum cluster size setting (or
> > as XP calls it, allocation unit size) when formatting a hard drive. I
> > have seen 32K, 64K, and some say leave it at the default of 512K.
>
> The default is 512 bytes, not 512 K. It's tiny, but frankly it does not
> seem to cause many problems on modern machines. It may have been more of
an
> issue on old machines with small CPUs.
>
>

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

"Kurt Albershardt" <kurt@nv.net> wrote in message
news:31783gF37jettU2@individual.net
> Arny Krueger wrote:
>> <Catdaddy> wrote in message
>> news:45cqq01poa1ns47op5ufsms1tsm45e68q3@4ax.com
>>
>>> In this group's opinion, what is the optimum cluster size setting
>>> (or as XP calls it, allocation unit size) when formatting a hard
>>> drive. I have seen 32K, 64K, and some say leave it at the default
>>> of 512K.
>>
>>
>> The default is 512 bytes, not 512 K. It's tiny, but frankly it does
>> not seem to cause many problems on modern machines. It may have been
>> more of an issue on old machines with small CPUs.
>
>
> I'm pretty sure the 512 bytes you're thinking of is the sector size
> on the drive media itself.

This is also true.

> This is the default for all but a few
> RAID setups and the only value most OS's will recognize.

MS says that the default NTFS cluster size for small partitions (512 MB or
less) is one sector - 512 bytes:

http://support.microsoft.com/defau [...] -us;314878

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

> If you had a zillion very small files, 512 bytes might be
> a good idea from the standpoint of space utilization.

The (very obvious) rule is that the larger the cluster size is with respect to
the average file size, the more space you waste.

There's another reason for using large clusters. As the sectors within them are
usually contiguous, your chance of recovering a deleted or corrupt file is
improved.