Is hard drive file cluster size important for capturing?

[alenhard]

It seems like I read somewhere that increasing the file cluster size (i.e. 4kb to 64kb) on a dedicated video capture hard drive has some added benefits. Can anyone confirm this?

[pbhalerao]

From your computer details, I find that you are using Windows XP. Are you using FAT32 or NTFS. If not NTFS, you should use NTFS as this file system is very stable and better.

You should leave the cluster size to default (4K) with NTFS. Increasing the cluster size may or may not help for Video capture. Till now, no one has really confirmed this.

Regards,

[Gazorgan]

Larger cluster size does help in capturing. Larger clusters mean less writing to the FAT table. This was very important back in the old PIO mode days (when you needed SCSI to capture well). It's very important if you capture a lot of Huffyuv or RAW video. Not very important if you capture MPEG1/2/4 video. If you not getting dropped frames with default cluster size (which isn't neccessarily 4 KB), then don't worry about it.

One downside is that a non-standard cluster size renders some disk utilities unusable. However, for a dedicated capture drive, so what? I never de-frag because I delete everything when I'm done.

[edsmith77]

alenhard,
Cluster size has minimal impact on recording. Notice I did not say NO impact. Gazorgan is correct in that "Larger cluster size does help in capturing." The problem is that the video capture card has to write the captured video to a safe media. Your hard disk. This takes a finite amount of time. The more often it has to do this, the more chances are it is going to take CPU cycles away from the video capture process, hence dropped frames. That is why it is important to use DMA mode. The cluster size also determines how often it has to write to the disk. In a linear sense, 4K cluster sizes must be dumped to disk 16 times more often that 64K clusters. Remember this does take time.
The downside of larger clusters is that disk space is ALWAYS allocated in cluster sizes. So if your file size is only 3K and you have 64K clusters you in essence have wasted 61K of disk space. Now if you have alot of these types of files this can add up. But in the video capture instance where file sizes are RARELY less than 64K this does not seem to present any problem. The net result is that if all you are doing is video capture, use the larger cluster size. It can only help. However, if your hard disk does double duty for other tasks, then this is not a good thing and you should stick with the 4K cluster sizes.
pbhalerao is very correct that you should be using NTFS if it is available. Remember if you are still using FAT32, you can convert to NTFS without re-formatting your HDD.

[alenhard]

Thanks for the info. Everything you have said has made perfect sense. I am using NTFS as the file system, and this drive is rareky used (right now anyway) for anything other than video capture.

I'm using a Canopus ADVC-100 for capturing, so CPU usage during capture is minimal. I never drop a frame. From what I can tell the only benefit of larger cluster size might mean less wear (cycles) on the CPU. So I guess it doesn't make much sense to increase the cluster size.

If I did decide to do it, however, how could I change it?

[divx2vcd]

It seems like I read somewhere that increasing the file cluster size (i.e. 4kb to 64kb) on a dedicated video capture hard drive has some added benefits. Can anyone confirm this?

Yes you can also check here.

https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=167085

Also, is there is an operating system meant mainly for
Video Editing.

[Gazorgan]

Format the drive. One of the options is cluster size. If your only doing video capture ( a few d/l files doesn't matter ), then go larger, 128 or 256 KB. Do not attempt this with a boot or system drive.

Again a dedicated capture drive can be formatted at will.