NTFS cluster size

I used to run my OS (WinXP SP1) from an ATA100 40gb Seagate (7.2k 8mb) formatted with FAT32.

It started to go wonky, so got a nice new Maxtor SATA150 (7.2 8mb) formatted with NTFS and a 4k cluster size (the default)

Thing is, although I can get huge file sizes now (yay!) it also seems a little slower and seems to thrash a whole load more than the seagate used to. I read up in google, and signs seem to point to cluster size difference. Apparently Partition Magic can create NTFS with bigger clusters that MS can?

Just wondering if its all in my head, or whether this is true. Anyone here have a cluster size of 4kb or greater on their NTFS 100gb+ drives - is anyone using FAT32 on their big drives?!

if i recall correctly you can pick your cluster size when formatting ntfs drives, as long as you're not trying to format your currently booted disk.

and one difference with NTFS is it's journalled - rather than with FAT32 where it'll write data A,B,and C, NTFS will write "beginning data writing" in the journal, "beginning data a", write data a, "ending data a", etc etc, so that in the event of power failure it can roll back to before it beganm to ensure no half-written files are left about. this can lead to more thrashing, since it needs to keep writing to the journal, wherever on the disk it lives.

and big clusters are a BAD thing - the bigger the cluster size, the smaller the maximum number of files you can fit on disk. NT 5 won't even format FAT32 drives larger than 32Gb or so unless forced...

Turn off Indexing that slows things down. There are a few tweaks to speed NTFS up by disabling old legacy stuff.

whats indexing? and how does it get turned off??

oh yeah, forgot about that one!

makes searching faster by keeping a log of all file details, so it can search that rather than the files themselves. right-click on a drive in my computer, proeperties, the indexing checkbox is at the bottom

Go to start then run then services.msc then set the indexing service to disabled and manual.

Heres the registry tweaks disables slow parts of NTFS, been running with these tweaks since i got XP. Tweaks Here Forget the 3rd one should not really need this but can easily cause problems depending on your setup

yeah, I disabled the Indexing already - so I guess the general concensus is just to leave it at 4kb then?

Yeah mines at 4kb, i dont have a problem, machine is fast enough, disk doesnt thrash.

BTW make sure the "Compress drive to save space" is disabled. Right click drive / Properties

Also if you havent done set a fixed size for the swap file. If you havent that causes disk thrashing and thus fragmentation, and the spiral of trashing continues

Compress was disabled and I've tried putting the swap on a separate HD as well as splitting it between two HDs

I'll try the above tweaks sometime, see if they make a difference. Could just be my IDE/SATA drivers, the NForce ones are supposed to be pretty icky depending on what version and whether you use the mobo, nvidia or MS ones

if you go here theres loads of system tweaks as well... Link :)