How do you format for a 128k raid stripe?

[Ugly_Jim]

I saw on the abit forums that you're supposed to format your stripe using the same cluster size as your stripe size. I settled on 128k, but neither partition magic nor windows disk management will let me format with a 128k cluster size. I even did it once before in win2k, but XP won't let me.

 

[Zuht]

You can set the cluster size with format ... /A:___K, but XP's format help says NTFS only supports up to 64k... might be worth a try anyhow.

 

[Ugly_Jim]

thanks

 

[Ice Czar]

both of those are huge cluster sizes,
what are you doing? (your application)

http://www.jsiinc.com/SUBE/tip2100/rh2120.htm
NOTE You can alter the cluster size used to format a drive in Disk Management and with the /a: option of the FORMAT command

NTFS Clusters and Cluster Sizes
"However, you should be careful before overriding the defaults and choosing a larger cluster size for a partition. You will lose the ability to use NTFS file compression, and the amount of slack will increase as well. Slack refers to wasted space due to files of variable size being placed into clusters of fixed size. The bigger the clusters, the more space that is wasted; while typically considered a FAT file system issue, this becomes relevant to NTFS as well if you use larger clusters. See this FAT file system page for a full explanation of slack. I also have written a more comprehensive discussion of NTFS partition size and cluster size selection issues. The default of 4 kiB for modern hard disk volumes is generally considered a decent overall compromise.

Stripe Width and Stripe Size
There are many "rules of thumb" that are thrown around to tell people how they should choose stripe size, but unfortunately they are all, at best, oversimplified. For example, some say to match the stripe size to the cluster size of FAT file system logical volumes. The theory is that by doing this you can fit an entire cluster in one stripe. Nice theory, but there's no practical way to ensure that each stripe contains exactly one cluster. Even if you could, this optimization only makes sense if you value positioning performance over transfer performance; many people do striping specifically for transfer performance.