I wonder if for a 120 GB partition, containing only large audio files, the NTFS default 4 KB cluster size is the best choise?
Wouldn't a size of 128 KB or so be better, to make the harddisk run more smoothly, so maybe even last longer, and make fragmentation less serious?

On the other hand, with clusters greater than 4 KB, windows disk defragmenter can't be used at all. Or is there other software that still can do it?
I won't defragment a 120 GB partition often anyway, the time it takes is frightening!

So should I go for large clusters and forget about defragmenting?

Hans

FORGET DEFRAGMANTING?! never...
I bought VoptXP 7 and am VERY satisfied with it. It's a great and fast deframentation program.
I think it should be able to defragment a partition with any cluster size.

I always desfragment my disk's forget cluster size if you don't defragment your disk a single file can be all spread in the disk

I take it you use Win2k, then only defraggers not based on Windows routines can defrag >4k cluster (norton speed disk is the only one currently).
With XP it doesn't matter, the OS itself supports >4k clusters, so any defrag software should do it.
I recommend using some sort o schedule for this drive to make it less fragmented over time.
Diskeeper is great, along with O&O, where O&O's defragger can defrag all metadata, which is exclusive for this feature.

If I remember correctly (and I may not be), NTFS has two special features that minimises fragmentation:

A: New files are always written with as few fragments as possible.
B: When modifying a file, the entire file is read and written anew.

I have been running NT since 1994 and have never needed to defrag any disk. I have used Norton Speed Disk a few times, but that was more for fun than out of need.

hahaha...
That's like the old advertisement for NTFS!
lol
"NTFS is such a powerful filesystem, it doesn't need to be defragged"
So, at first they didn't include a defragger in the OS but quite fast it proved M$ wrong and they had to include it.

I have win2k and I defragment 80gb hdd once a month. It makes a big difference for me!

Thanks for the replies so far

An NTFS partition with 32 KB clusters caused VoptXP to say: "This drive has a cluster size which will not permit defragmenting".
So as you said MTRH, only Norton Speed disk may be able to defrag large clusters (and yes, I use Win2k).

32?! Are you insane? Who needs this kind of cluster size? What benifit do you think it will bring you?

Huh, why not? There will be audio files only on this partition, basically no files below a few MB's.
I would expect that if fragments are at least of cluster size, performance will not suffer much if the clusters are large. Actually I was thinking of at least 128 KB clusters...

Hans

Man.. I never heard of anyone who uses 32kb, or over, or even 16kb for cluster size. There must be a reason. I'll try to find info on using such sizes, if it affect anything negatively or positively.

http://www.altusnet.com/lti/160web/cluster.htm
http://www.ntsecrets.com/info/file_systems.htm

I don't get it...
So my partitions use 64kb clusters?? If they do, why doesn't VoptXP give me an error message?..

Ah ha..

Windows NT 3.5 and Earlier: The first versions of the file system use the entire table above. So if you are running Windows NT 3.5 and create a single 6 GB partition, it will use 16 sectors per cluster (8 kiB).

Windows NT 3.51 and Later (Including Windows 2000): Only the first four entries in the table are used. The maximum cluster size is 4 kiB for all partitions over 2.0 GiB, regardless of their size.

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/ntfs/a...hCluster-c.html

I was way wrong about cluster sizes.. Never read anything about it, i used Win2000 and knew that 4kb was the highest.

Larger cluster sizes speed up the file system, but waste more space. I have my 60 gig drive divided into three partitions under FAT32: 10gigs (8k clusters), 20gigs (16k) and 30 gigs (16k). I use the first for the OS and most programs, the second for data & temporary storage, and the third (E:) for multimedia .

Only XP can handle 4k+ clustersize.
the larger clustersize is effective for larger files, or possibly midsized audio files. 32k is "max" I'd say, no effect should be noteceable beyond that.

I formatted a 60 GB partition with 64 KB clusters, and copied a music library of about 2800 mp3's and 280 albumcover jpg's into it.
Total size of all files is 26,539 GB.
Size on disk with 4 KB clusters is 26,546 GB.
Size on disk with 64 KB clusters is 26,655 GB
So with this 'typical' library, the wasted space is small even with these large clusters.

Indeed Norton Utilities' Speed Disk has no problem with 64 KB clusters.

Hans

ofcourse not, and with XP, no defragger would