Opinions on allocation unit/cluster size for doing audio/video work?

[muzician21]

About to do a clean install of Windows, any opinions, experience on
what the C: drive and other drives should be at on a machine that does
a lot of audio/video work?

Thanks

[Richard Crowley]

"muzician21" wrote ...
> About to do a clean install of Windows, any opinions, experience on
> what the C: drive and other drives should be at on a machine that does
> a lot of audio/video work?

Unless you're storing tiny bits like frational-second sound effects, etc
I would think that the larger (to largest) allocation/cluster sizes would
be most efficient. Based on the fact that virtually all the audio or video
files are multiples of even the largest cluster size.

That would seem to be ideal for a dedicated media drive. But for a
volume that is shared with lots of other uses (like the boot/system drive),
you would need to make a judgment call on the tradeoff benefit.

[Arny Krueger]

"muzician21" > wrote in message

> About to do a clean install of Windows, any opinions,
> experience on what the C: drive and other drives should
> be at on a machine that does a lot of audio/video work?

Given the huge size of current drives and the fact that its mostly the huge
A/V files that eat them up, I just set cluster size at the max, obtain the
best possible performance for large files, and suffer the slightly
suboptimal space utilization for small files.

[Peter Larsen[_3_]]

Richard Crowley wrote:

> "muzician21" wrote ...
>> About to do a clean install of Windows, any opinions, experience on
>> what the C: drive and other drives should be at on a machine that
>> does a lot of audio/video work?

> Unless you're storing tiny bits like frational-second sound effects,
> etc I would think that the larger (to largest) allocation/cluster sizes
> would be most efficient. Based on the fact that virtually all the
> audio or video files are multiples of even the largest cluster size.

> That would seem to be ideal for a dedicated media drive. But for a
> volume that is shared with lots of other uses (like the boot/system
> drive), you would need to make a judgment call on the tradeoff
> benefit.

Messing with the cluster size imo goes hand in hand with raid(5)
optimization for sql databases; it is then a good idea to use a cluster size
that equals the stripe size. I would not bother in any other context, also
because not all defragmentation tools may like anything but the default
cluster size.

Generally it is, according to advice I got over in the microsot news tree
back in win9x days, better to leave it at memory map segment size, which
happens to be 4k. I made some experiments with cluster size on audio drives
back in those win9x days and found no difference in read and write speed in
the single megabytes pr. second of that day and age and also tested what
vcache sizes that gave best performance.

If it really matters, say for pagefile and for temp files used with
Audition, then I - also in accordance with the advice I got back then - use
FAT32 because it requires less head movement during reading and writing a
contiguous file because it doesn't use a transaction log to allow for
rolling back an action in case it doesn't complete and because of alledged
lower cpu use. Things have gotten a lot faster since then, but the basic
properties of FAT32 and NTFS are the same.

Kind regards

Peter Larsen