Solved Recommended format and cluster size for external SSD

spapakons said:

Why GPT? This is only if you plan to install Windows on it or if the disk is larger than 2TB (MBR is limited to 2TB per partition). GPT will create a couple of small FAT32 system partitions which are totally unnecessary for a secondary (no system) disk. I

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Not true, I prepped this 4TB external disk with Windows File Management.

Sheikh said:

for the last question, which app do you recommend for creating partitions and formatting drives? I guess rufus is suitable for me, but is it recommended to use it for formatting a brand new SSD too?

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I just use Windows Disk Management unless there's reason not to.

Some things to be aware of:

1) NTFS is far better at managing slack space (the unused space at the end of a cluster) so it has a big advantage there.

2) People get overly concerned with SSD lifespan. You are highly unlikely to use up an SSDs usable life even after many years.

Let's take an example: I have an SSD with a 1,200 TBW rating (1,200 TB can be written before the usable life is considered depleted). That works out to being able to write over 650GB EVERY SINGLE DAY for 5 years. How likely are you to do that?

I do stuff that most people don't. I install Windows from scratch to a VM a minimum of 5 times a day, every day, and that is just for starters. But none of my SSDs are more than 20% life used even after a several years.

Probably the biggest thing that you can do to extend the lifespan of an SSD if that is a major concern for you is to purchase a larger SSD. With each doubling in size, you double the TBW rating. So, a 1TB drive will have double the usable writes as a 512GB drive.

garlin said:

When your filesystem consists mostly of very large files (like movies or databases), the large cluster size helps improve disk I/O performance. The relative percentage of wasted space taken up by incompletely filled data blocks won't be a big factor. But if you have thousands of smaller files, then the unused space taken up by larger clusters steals a non-trivial amount of usable space from your volume.

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I have that. Say large files 5-7GB each.

What would be a good File Allocation unit size I should format the drive to before I transfer large video files to it for ideal I/O playback performance?

Normally, the default memory page size for Windows is 4K. When Windows assigns more memory to a process, it's allocated in 4K blocks. So better disk I/O is served by some multiple of the memory page size. Most modern disks have internal controllers that will do 4K block transfers.

If you have large files that are read more or less in continuous fashion, like a video file, then 8K-64K may work better. But on a single drive (even a SSE), the I/O path at some point becomes a bottleneck because Windows has to wait for the drive to finish transferring that much data in one pass before the application can begin reading it.

Video professionals are typically using HW or SW-based RAID arrays, and striping data across multiple drives. It's faster having 4 drives each delivering 4K of data (aggregating to 16K total), than waiting for one drive to deliver 16K of data at once. At some point, a single drive stops loses any benefit from having a larger block size.

But that's mostly for streaming raw video frames. Most users are playing back highly compressed movies, so your codec's efficiency is a much bigger factor than how fast the movie is being read into memory. If you spend a lot of time copying around multi-GB movie files from disk to disk, bigger block size helps the copying speed. It probably doesn't help your playback performance.

My 6TB mechanical hard disk is GPT partition scheme, single NTFS partition and for HD video I use the AVC codec to keep it Blu Ray compatible. My nVidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics card can handle AVC and HEVC videos fine, I never seen any lag, even when playing 4K 10-bit HEVC videos. So the hard disk structure is not a bottleneck, unless we are talking about some lossless codec or uncompressed video. Hardly an average user would use these, so don't think about it. Just use the default settings.

I have never worried about the cluster size of my disks, and I doubt I'm losing enough performance or space for me to worry about.

Sheikh said:

Hey guys.

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Quite seriously, I’d be extremely disappointed if I logged in here and didn’t see a post by you regarding smashing Windows with a hammer.
Sure, this isn’t really in that category, but I like how bold you are

gunrunnerjohn said:

I have never worried about the cluster size of my disks, and I doubt I'm losing enough performance or space for me to worry about.

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It can matter. I purchased a 14 TB external drive, and didn't pay attention it was factory formatted as exFAT with 128 KB clusters.

Normally I always reformat new drives, but this time was rushing to re-organize files from one set of drives to another. Started the copying, and suddenly noticed the new drive was eating up space much faster than anticipated.

New drivers don´t need to be reformatted, but formatted, and, first, they must be initialized.

I always initialize as GPT. MBR is obsolete, a relic from the BIOS days.

When a drive is initialized as GPT, the 16 MB MSR partition is created. It´s only one partition, not two, and obviously it doesn´t take much space. Besides, it can be deleted.

A quick format is still a format.

garlin said:

It can matter. I purchased a 14 TB external drive, and didn't pay attention it was factory formatted as exFAT with 128 KB clusters.

Normally I always reformat new drives, but this time was rushing to re-organize files from one set of drives to another. Started the copying, and suddenly noticed the new drive was eating up space much faster than anticipated.

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OK, I do check because I format anything that is just for Windows storage as NTFS. I don't think I've ever gotten a large drive like that in exFAT format...

Seagate markets 14 TB externals for both Windows and Mac, so it's exFAT out of the box. What I didn't notice before, was the absurd cluster size.

For me, one of the biggest limitations of MBR is that it limits you to 2TB. So, for anything larger than that, GPT is the way to go.

antspants said:

Quite seriously, I’d be extremely disappointed if I logged in here and didn’t see a post by you regarding smashing Windows with a hammer.
Sure, this isn’t really in that category, but I like how bold you are

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Sometimes it's beneficial to rethink simple concepts. There are numerous websites across the internet that discuss topics like GPT, MBR, NTFS, cluster size, and more. However, many of these sites simply replicate information from one another with minimal changes. When you pose basic questions about common tasks, forum members often provide answers that you may have never encountered before. This is how I learn: I first read about a topic online, then consult an AI to confirm my understanding, and finally, I seek advice here before proceeding with a task. Additionally, some information on popular websites like Windows Central or XDA can be outdated. Therefore, asking here can yield the most current insights based on users' knowledge and experience.

You mentioned "smashing Windows with a hammer!" I’ve made some adjustments to my script, and today I will release version 6 (beta) of Windows Optimizer script.

After testing various services, tasks, and registry keys, I am finally reaching a stable state. Last night, I tested version 6 on a virtual machine using an official Windows image.

Here is a comparison:


You might think that reducing 30 processes and 600MB of RAM isn't worth the effort. You're right; however, exceeding these limits could lead to instability or compatibility issues. I also plan to test this script on a modified version of Windows created with NTLite, which will use significantly less RAM—specifically, 65 processes and 1GB of RAM usage, which is the lowest I've achieved without causing problems.

While some users may not be concerned about these tweaks, they are crucial for understanding how each component of the system functions. Many users perform numerous terminal tasks and praise Linux as being fantastic, yet they often hesitate to engage with command-line operations in Windows. Additionally, my non-upgradable Huawei laptop continues to perform as swiftly as it did on the day I purchased it after installing Windows 10, and its battery usage is highly optimized!

I recall my childhood, when I eagerly took things apart to understand how they worked and how to repair them. Unfortunately, the doctors lost hope and predicted that I would become an engineer—just like I am today!

Linux is lighter than Windows out of the box because it runs much fewer processes (and has fewer features) by default. Once you add the features and apps you want it gets increasingly slower, so eventually there is no real benefit in performance over Windows. Add to that the much less user friendly than Windows and significantly lower hardware and software support and you can understand why I don't like it and I would never recommend it to the average user. Better use an old Windows version, even Windows 7 or XP, than use Linux.

Sheikh said:

You might think that reducing 30 processes and 600MB of RAM isn't worth the effort

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It doesn’t matter what I think, my mate. It matters what you’re learning by trial and error. I wish I had the same patience as you do.

spapakons said:

Linux is lighter than Windows out of the box because it runs much fewer processes (and has fewer features) by default. Once you add the features and apps you want it gets increasingly slower, so eventually there is no real benefit in performance over Windows. Add to that the much less user friendly than Windows and significantly lower hardware and software support and you can understand why I don't like it and I would never recommend it to the average user. Better use an old Windows version, even Windows 7 or XP, than use Linux.

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Not (usually) true -- of course if you go bonkers -- then all bets are off -- Linux is highly modular so even if you have loads of apps and one of the larger GUI'ed desktops e,g KDE or GNOME Linux can still be zillions of times a better performer. Most Linux apps are "dynamically loaded" plus don't need the GUI stuff as that can all done with api calls so you only need the application code -and don't forget it's a multi-user system so you can have many people using the system at the same time -- plus a lot of stuff is loaded via kernel modules at boot time so only need to be in the system once and don't need to be loaded each time an application is called. Decent swap management handles dynamic memory and users address spaces (especially if you have many users on at once).

With increasing containerisation too apps can be run inside containers which means the actual core OS can be quite small.

Windows is essentially monolithic -- even a "badly hobbled Linux system" on modest hardware can outperform a well tuned Windows system.

There's enough real time tests all over the place to demonstrate this if people are even bothered. I'd suspect so long as their systems seem to be working "OK-ish" they are satisfied. Slow downs are much more likely to be caused by poor internet speeds, slow disks, poorly written application code, lack of RAM, poor graphics, overloaded / poorly written code on the remote servers people are wanting to access, zillions of mail in IMAP servers causing long sync times when opening email etc etc.

BUT : --For what it actually does and what it has to handle -- almost any bit of hardware on the planet - Windows actually does a surprisingly good job - and unless you really know what you are doing - best to leave things to "default". Linux being open source - obviously it's far easier for people to get the ultimate performance out of the OS - but also to totally hose it up too. !!! It's quite hard to "accidentally break" a Windows system. Any su or sudo command on a Linux system can break it totally if used wrongly.

Cheers
jimbo

If I break Windows, I know how to fix it or I can easily find in Google or a forum like this one. If I break Linux, it is much harder to fix it and eventually I have to do a clean installation. Not very convenient.

I looked at all the processes running with my installations of WIndows, I agree it's an imposing lot. OTOH, that's one reason I equipped my main computer with 64GB of RAM and a decently fast processor. While I know I can trim quite a few of them, and I actually have trimmed about 20 or so, I don't go crazy as I just don't see a ROI for spending a ton of time researching every possible cut. I did go through and uninstall some of the stuff I don't use and don't intend to use anytime soon, OneDrive, CoPilot, etc. I also look at the stuff I've installed, and if I really am not using it anymore, I remove it.