Setting Optimal Allocation Unit Size in Partition?

[Spare-Flair]

Hi, I'm formatting a new 200GB Seagate and I would like to know what my best choice for allocation unit size is.

I've googled and some people recommend 4K because of i386 and NTFS but others say that choosing the largest size is best (64K?) when dealing with large files because it maximizes disk space? Then again, others say that because this is the smallest amount of space that a file can occupy, it will be a great waste of space because any files that are smaller than the unit allocation size will take up the whole thing.

I'm not sure what this drive is going to be, but it won't be a boot drive. More of a file storage for movies, games, music, but I'll also be putting a lot of small archived documents and pictures in it too.

What is my best choice?

 

[tdg]

Stick with the default of 4K. There are some performance vs space usage benefits with going higher or lower, but some disk utilities are known not to work with anything other than the default.

 

[stevewm]

Large cluster sizes are benefitcial when doing heavy work with very large files, such as multi-gigabyte video or audio files.

For normal use and for storage drives smaller cluster sizes are better (but not too small!)

NTFS uses a default of 4k. This is just fine for normal usage. You will see no benefit in larger sizes. Using smaller sizes than 4k may decrease throughput and cause fragmentation to occur more readily.


In short, stick with 4k, unless you plan on doing some heavy video editing on the drive.