Partitioning – Allocation Unit Size

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Posted By
FCS2Johnson
Apr 11, 2007
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Adding a new external drive. Primary partition will be used for image and PSD files only. Was going to try setting size to either 16K, 32K, or 64K. Any thoughts or recomendations on this. Will setting it at the max size 64K help performance, and or any negative reasons why you would want to settle for a smaller size. Thanks.
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FCS2Johnson
Apr 11, 2007
Would still welcome any feedback regarding the extent to which formatting your drive with a larger cluster size effects CS2 performance.

Adobe this is one item that is missing from the very good FAQ on how to, "Optimize performance of Photoshop (CS2 on Windows)". This might be worth including if it can make a difference, including any pros and cons that need to be considered.

Regarding one reason you may not want to exceed the maximum default settings, 4,096 bytes (4 KB), is that "NTFS file compression is not possible on drives with a larger allocation size." according to Microsoft.

Microsoft – "The Default Cluster Size for the NTFS and FAT File Systems"

<http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314878>

I never use NTFS compression on my image files, so I am not concerned about that, but it may matter to some of you. Here is information on NTFS compression…

<http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307987>
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FCS2Johnson
Apr 11, 2007
I just did a less than perfect test, but in a nutshell here are the results. Opening a 770MB PSD file from the same hard drive, with one copy located on a partition formated with 64K clusters, and the other copy located on a partition with a 4K cluster. Both took approx 2 minutes and five seconds to open in CS2.

So it didn’t seem to make any difference with my typical PSD file. Will hedge my bet and go with 16K instead of 64K.
H
Ho
Apr 11, 2007
I generally run the default cluster size. I don’t think it matters much unless you have a RAID setup.

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