I am wondering what the advantages of Allocation Unit Size setting have to do with any read/ write or access performance when formatting a new hard drive or SSD?
Default seems to be 4096 bytes but options exist to 64 kb
Would someone please like to clarify that…Thanks in Advance, AL
Even with HDDs, my tests of transfers of several GBs of mixed-size files between two drives were 30 to 50% faster when both drives were formatted with 64kB sectors, compared to the default (Win) 4kB.
My testing with SSDs has shown similar ratios.
The downside of larger sector sizes, is that smaller files will result in more partially filled sectors, with many nearly empty. To put that in perspective, with 64KB sectors, a multimedia drive, with its very large file sizes, will result in 0.5% lost space, whereas a Win OS drive has 8%. However, for DAWs, the OS drive doesn’t really need large sectors, and with Win 8.x, I couldn’t find a way of installing the OS on an already-formatted drive, so couldn’t make them larger anyway.
The more critical ones are the project and sample drives, where it is easy to format them with larger sectors (under Win, at least).