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GeneralEffect of Allocation Unit size on transfer performance for a HDD Pin
Cornelius Henning16-Sep-16 6:06
professionalCornelius Henning16-Sep-16 6:06 
A couple of weeks ago, I decided to test if the allocation unit size (when formatting a disk) has any effect on the speed at which data is transferred to the disk. Note: This was on a conventional hard drive. I have not tested SSDs.

Without boring you with the test procedure, I found that:

1) Increasing the allocation unit size from the Windows default of 4096 bytes, to a higher value, like 16,384 bytes has very little effect when writing large numbers of smaller files. In fact the average amount of wasted space on the disk is around 8,192 bytes per file, whereas the average wasted space with an allocation unit of 4096 is only 2,048 bytes per file. However, there is less fragmentation of the disk with larger allocation units.

2) The larger allocation unit has a major effect on performance when transferring large files (several Gigabytes). With very large files, like system drive images (30 Gigabytes and more) the write speed to the disk increased between 30 and 40%

Conclusion: If you can dedicate a complete drive or partition to large files, like video or image files, it may be worthwhile to format that drive with a large allocation unit, like 8,192 or 16,384 bytes. Since the disk will not hold large numbers of files, the increase in wasted space per file is not important.

Note: Certain types of encryption will only work on disks with 4096 allocation units. I also suspect that increasing the allocation units on SSDs will have little or no effect, but I have not done tests on SSDs

For my tests I used a 4TB Western Digital disk drive in an old Vanteq Nexar enclosure, connected to the computer via USB3. It will probably not work in the newer line of Vanteq enclosures, as their transfer rate seems significantly slower than the old Nexars
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!


modified 16-Sep-16 12:14pm.

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