Intel Communities: Message List

Re: cluster size other that 4KB on Intel SSD

webadmin@intel.com — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 15:55:15 GMT

Hello,

Almost two years later, I finally was able to satisfy my curiosity.

I got a new laptop, with to different SSDs installed (not Intel though).

On five identical size partitions, except for the cluster sizes 4KB, 8KB, 16KB, 32KB and 64KB respectively, I ran CrystalDiskMark Seq and 512K random performance tests.

Result:

All indicated performance figures were within 1.5%, a difference which I consider to be smaller than the measurement accuracy.

And no trend in one way or another!

Conclusion: I formatted all my partitions with 4KB cluster sizes.

Re: cluster size other that 4KB on Intel SSD

webadmin@intel.com — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 18:40:48 GMT

The motivation for my original question is that I want to maximize the responsiveness of my W7 laptop.

So I think I have to optimize it for large program and data files being loaded, small ones will load quickly anyway.

I therefore generated my data and backup partitions to NTFS with 64KB clusters (unit=64k in diskpart parlance).

Despite many efforts, I did not succeed in changing the system partition's cluster size to anything greater than 4KB, neither before installation (diskpart), nor after installation (Partition Wizard Pro) which provides a "change cluster size" function.

The Partition Wizard Pro's error message indicated that my system contains compressed files, files which can only be held in 4KB clusters.

When I will do the next clean install, I will create a separate partition for the program files, partition which I can create with 64KB clusters.

Thank you for informing me about the alignment issue.

It turned out that my boot + system partition was not correctly aligned, even though I had used the diskpart align=1024 parameter.

I finally succeded by omitting the align= parameter, in other words, W7 does align properly without any help from the user.

Re: cluster size other that 4KB on Intel SSD

webadmin@intel.com — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 16:35:11 GMT

The referenced pdf reports of tests with workloads of various "block" sizes, but it does not compare various "cluster" sizes in e.g. NTFS.

Re: cluster size other that 4KB on Intel SSD

webadmin@intel.com — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 07:15:53 GMT

I read the post about PAT.

Alignment seems to be important for SSD performance, so I will use PAT if someone can provide it (the free offer does not exist any more).

BTW, I have tried to do the right thing by using the align= parameter in diskpart.

But my original question about cluster size other than 4KB is still unanswered.

Re: cluster size other that 4KB on Intel SSD

webadmin@intel.com — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 17:06:58 GMT

Sorry, but can't you be any more precise with your reference?

cluster size other that 4KB on Intel SSD

webadmin@intel.com — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 14:31:42 GMT

Most program and data files are much larger than they were when 4KB became the default value for cluster size.

I would like to know whether there is any inconvenience (other than wasting some space) in having 64KB clusters.

And what performance improvements could I expect while loading today’s programs and data files.

The information found on the Internet is rather conflicting.

But Intel certainly has solid measured results.