I sure am glad (well not glad as in "happy" but relieved) that others have had problems with 1394 drives! I've got three hooked up to this machine and have had to relegate them to DVD project storage and editing archives, doing all post work on the Western Digital 120 with 8 meg cache. Endless problems with the darn Maxtor and occasional fatal hiccups with the Lacies. I guess having all SCSI at work has spoiled us a bit. Haven't had problems on the DVD front using 1394s but the 1394s cause this PC, 1.4 Ghz with gig RAM, Raedon and Audigy Platinum to just stall for several minutes. Never happens when using the WD though.

Peter

According to Microsoft---512 is the most efficient and will pack up your drive with the
most data compared to the higher allocations which will add many empty spaces
in that allocation. The higher allocations are for servers. Win2k will default to
the 4096 allocation. You will notice that if you had 10 gigs of data on a 4096 allocation
that if you change the allocation to 512 there will be more space on the hard drive
available for use. I'm sure there are more reasons these allocations are available
but no one seems to know why.

JJK

Microsoft says: Allocation Unit: The smallest amount of disk space that can be allocated to hold a file.

So, if all files are really big (like DV AVI's) then it would seem that the 64k (largest) size would be most efficient since it requires less pointers in the file allocatin table.

A 500 MB file (512,000 KB) would occupy 1024000 bytes in the file allocation table at 512, while it would only occupy 8000 bytes in the file allocation table at 64K.

And it's not just disk space you'd save with the small FAT; I think NTFS checks file security for every FAT entry.

How's my math?

Wellll..... Myself & those folks I know would just let XP or win2k format it to the default as an ntfs disk.

This used to be a big issue with smaller hard drives, where you were trying to get every last gasp of space. If you had a file that was say 75 K, and 64 k clusters, then it would take 2 clusters to store the file, with an 11 k slack wasted. If you had or have a large file, then the only waste comes at the last bit of the file, if it doesn't fill up the allocated cluster - so with larger video/audio files, not much of an effective savings.

On the other hand, there is some overhead related to more/smaller clusters - windows has always defaulted to a larger size as the size of the disk goes up.

FWIW, actually had to ask to refresh my memory, as haven't heard anyone really talking about this stuff since the days when you had to partition a drive to beat the DOS/windows limits.

I was initially having problems with 1394 drives. As it turned out, windows 2000 set them up as dynamic disks. I reformatted and made them basic disks and have not had a hickup since. Routine defragmenting seems to help also.

JAB

use the biggest allocation unit size you can for a video drive.

I found what works best for me is, basic disk with 4096 for the unit size. There is a change in the options when you go from 4096 to 8192. Not sure what difference it would make, but these setting finally worked well for me.
The 8Meg cache on the Western Digital drives seems to have improved stability on my system, so I'm going after more.

-Robert

Probably your math is a little off there. Each allocation unit gets filled with data except for the last one.

Certainly, if you have millions of 1 k files each getting a 64k allocation unit then each will waste 63k. But if you have big files then only the last unit can be partially filled. You don't waste much and you'd nevere ever waste more than 63k/file.

The point about FAT size is right. I assume the NTFS overhead issue is right too.

Rob Mack

Not so in my case but it's another to add to the list.

Rob Mack

I'm going with the 64K allocation size.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Be careful if choosing a cluster size larger than the default as I have found that neither the built-in defrag utility or Diskeeper would defrag hard drives with a cluster size larger than the default (which in most situations will be 4096 for either Win2k or XP).

See the following for default ntfs cluster sizes in Win2k or XP:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=140365
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=140365