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They said if we have a bigger block size on our HDD, file operations will be ultimately faster.
Logically, this is acceptable.
I have a HDD with 64K block size (biggest in NT family) but it seems there is no difference in speed to my another HDD with standard 4K block size.
Note: Both of them are Seagate and have the same size and format: NTFS.
What's wrong?
I'd be careful with such big block sizes, however. It means a lot of wasted space.
If a file is anything lower than 64KB, then the "physical" space on disk will actually be 64KB, hence the 64KB - Actual File Size is wasted (meaning unusable)!
Well yes and no. There is a point where operations will in fact become slower (There is a sweet spot). Among the other downsides of a large block size.Quote:
They said if we have a bigger block size on our HDD, file operations will be ultimately faster.
Logically, this is acceptable.
The speed goes asymptotically to the optimal speed as you increase the block size. There is a point at which increasing it further just won't matter anymore. I'm guessing that point is somewhere around 4K, and that's why Microsoft set it to be the default. Beyond that, you will be wasting a lot of space, with negligible gain in speed.
Try comparing 64 bytes block size to 4K and you will probably see a difference.
> Try comparing 64 bytes block size to 4K and you will probably see a difference.
The sector size is 512 bytes.
> They said if we have a bigger block size on our HDD, file operations will be ultimately faster.
Windows will try to allocate clusters consecutively on disk anyway, so
4 + 4 + 4 + 4 all on the same track is no different to 16 (on the same track).
What really kills HD performance is that average seek times are still measured in milliseconds.
That is, >1M times slower than your typical processor.
In human terms, that's 1 second to 12 DAYS!
Small cluster sizes can kill your defragmenter, though. I know because I've tried :p
I wrote a defragmenter program two years ago hence I use 64K block size instead of 4K.Quote:
Originally Posted by Elysia
In approx. 120 GB HDD, defragmenting 64K just take less than 30 minutes, it takes 60 minutes++ in 4K.
The main drawback for the 64K is small related files such as photo album, offline websites, hentais :P or anything contains a lot of small files should be archived in mountable archive format such as Zip for quick access.