Best NTFS setting

[Mythos2002]

Forgive me if this is the wrong section, but I wasn't sure where to post. It deals with capturing, but also with NTFS settings.

I bought a new 250 Gb hard drive and was wondering what the best setting would be to use for NTFS. What I mean specifically is the allocation unit size. The settings are default, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16k, 32k, and 64k.

Thanks.

Mythos

[sacajaweeda]

If you use 8,192, an 8,000 byte file uses one cluster (8,192 bytes on disk) but a 9,000 byte file uses two clusters (16,384 bytes)

Smaller would be better I believe.

[Mythos2002]

Okay thanks. I believe the default would be good. I believe that is something like 512.

Mythos

[Kolosus]

Best to let windows choose this automatically. It will choose cluster size according to volume size.

[The village idiot]

Check the computer forum, there was a discussion about this. I think if you are doing video only on that drive, the bigger, the better. When you make it 8K size, then put a 100byte file on the drive, it uses all 8K for that file. Since video is much larger, a larger size can make better. I think. Anyway check the computer forum.

[D_Knife]

If your are ONLY going to put video files onto that partition then make the allocation unit size the largest you can -- 64K
This uses the least amounts of allocation units when writting large files

If your putting anything else on the partition, applications, images,mp3 whatever then go with the auto-selected size options, which for most drives in between 512 bytes and 4K