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Is cluster size even a thing anymore?

brett

Senior Member
Just setting up a new Samsung 860 2TB SSD for streaming samples (not OS)

GPT vs MBR? (I went GPT)

Cluster size? 4kb or 64kb?

Or is the whole cluster size thing very 'last decade' or no longer relevant for SSDs?
 
Cluster size does still matter with SSD - it's a tradeoff of disk usage versus performance. Specifically, it's the smallest amount of disk space that can be used to hold a single file (and the multiple of storage that files will be rounded up to in general).

Large cluster size (64kb) means overall faster performance, as the file system can make better assumptions about where files start/end on disk. But it means that the smallest an individual file can be is 64kb (e.g. a 1kb file still takes up 64kb of disk), and for the way some music samples are stored (bazillions of tiny files), this is atrocious. Small cluster size is just the reverse of this.

If 2tb is more than enough for you by a generous margin, or if you're pretty sure your sample libraries aren't of the "bazillion of files" variety, then large cluster size *may* make things a touch faster. But small cluster size is probably the safer choice, it should still be plenty fast, and your disk usage will thank you.

This article is pretty good for more details (Windows, but Mac is similar for this, and even supports exFAT): https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/140365/default-cluster-size-for-ntfs-fat-and-exfat
 
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Sometimes I wonder in the majority of the tweaks we still do are legacy windows XP tweaks and no longer relevant. Looks like cluster size is arguably in this category. Thanks to you both
 
Yes, that's true. The old background processes vs programs preference also doesn't improve ASIO performance ever since W8 IIRC...
 
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