How well does a Momentus XT handle multiple volumes having different cluster sizes?

Does everyone who owns one run only one partition/volume w/a default allocation size of 4K, or are there any that run two (or more) w/different allocation sizes? Wondering 'bout the performance of the SSD part of the this drive when that is done?

I own one of these [the 500gig'r]. It wasn't the panacea I was hoping it would be, but noticeably better than the drive that came w/my 8740w. However the one thing I was hoping it would really help with -- that being stepping from 16 Meg RAW image to image at a 100% view in Lightroom, thus all sharpening and noise reduction applied -- hasn't sped-up much if at all; I'm even willing to say it is inconsistently slower at times, where I see in the real-world what HDTune shows of large dips in the performance graph over time.

So I'm thinking about creating a 64Gig or maybe larger OS & Apps partition or volume with 4K allocation, and the remaining 400-ish Gigs allocated to another partition or volume with a 64K allocation on which all the Lightroom catalog, JPEG and RAW files would be located, which all are large files.

... I'm curious if any owners have done this already, and finds the hybrid nature of this drive behaves just as well this way as when only a single partition/volume is used?

thanx much.

 

The SSD caching portion of the drive is hardware level and does not care about your clusters. it will not help lightroom over what the same modification would do for a standard HDD. Since the file is primarily sequential and large the SSD portion does not help too much.

In fact the SSD portion probably reads slightly slower than the outer tracks as it is a single chip not an ararray of chips set up for high speed but access time of cource is very fast. In the end the alogorithym is set up for lots of smaller files that are read often.

For large sequential reads a high end SSD would be best. Beware using a SF2 drive here as all those writes will enable life time write throttling at a frequent rate even with Secure Erases being done often.

The XT's will yeild you some improvement but do not treat it as a SSD but optimize it as a HDD for your usage. Then let the hardware ram and NAND cache do its thing.........

 

The Momentus XT has 4GB of flash memory. Only that much will be sped up. All your photos your store are going to see no improvement in performance. It only works for 4GB of the most accessed data on the drive.