SSD Question

[Hyperacusis]

I've been considering getting myself an SSD, and obviously the one thing everyone seems to be going on about is the issue with Vista and the write block sizes. So this got me thinking, what's a good NTFS block size to use on an SSD drive, and/or does it have any impact at all? I always formatted my hard drives NTFS with 4 kb allocation sizes, which is the default. What kind of impact do different allocation sizes have on SSD performance?

Any insight would be much appreciated!

 

[Joe Average]

Same answer I've been giving for a lot of stuff of late:

Leave it alone.

Even though SSD technology is still relatively "new" compared to hard drive technology (50 years old these days), there's really nothing you can do to extract any additional performance from them on an individual device basis - meaning in a non-RAID setup.

Each SSD is by default pretty much as fast as it's going to get, there's no special "Turbo mode" or anything like it, so tinkering around with NTFS logical cluster sizes isn't going to garner you one damned extra bit per second I'd say.

People are ridiculously fanatical about performance these days. Does anyone actually believe that milking an SSD for a few more bits per second by restructuring the time tested and performance proven NTFS file system defaults?

Really?

 

[Lazn_Work]

Due to the nature of SSD's and how when writing data that doesn't totally overwrite a full internal "block" it has to read then compare then write, SSD's are fare more picky about block and cluster size.

However I don't know how you'd be able to get the file system to align it's clusters with the logical ones in the drive.

http://www.alternativerecursion.info/?p=106

 

[Hyperacusis]

That's exactly what I was thinking. Reason being, in all the reviews I've seen with the ATTO write benchmark on SSD drives, the performance always seems to go up when the file is written in, say, 64 kb chunks as opposed to 4 kb chunks. So yeah, I guess I was just wondering if changing the allocation size in the file system would have any impact at all on how Windows chooses to allocate writes. I suppose we get to wait until Microsoft (hopefully) issues a fix for it.