Cluster Size

[PhantomVideo]

Hi Everyone

When dealing with DVCPRO HD P2 card storage Would there be any benifit to HD speed if i change the NTFS cluster size to 64k instead of the 4k default?

Cheers

 

[THoff]

Yes, that should be slightly more efficient given the large size of the files. I'm not sure that you'll be able to feel the difference.

 

[ProfessorU]

The only drawback would be a loss of space, relative to the total number of files on the drive. I wouldn't do it for your system drive, for example.

 

[THoff]

If you put a large number of small files on the drive it might be a concern, but for the large files used in the MXF workflow, the larger cluster size would be more efficient.

It is also important to understand that NTFS will store small files in the MFT (Master File Table) itself, where they can take up far less space than one cluster. If you have a small file like LASTCLIP.TXT, it would take a few bytes instead of the 4KB it would consume with a 4KB cluster size.