determine allocation unit size

Hello,

I have a 200GB hard drive in my laptop and made 2 partitions on it. An 80g partition for windows and programs and 120GB for storage.

The 120GB partition needs to be formatted before I can use it but I don't know what allocation unit size I should set it to.

These are my options...

Default allocation size
512 bytes
1024 bytes
2048 bytes
4096 bytes

If it helps, the majority of the 120GB partition will be storing my video files. Mostly anime (about 75GB worth) and some music files too. Each anime episode is roughly about 170MB.

Also, should i put a check next to Quick Format and Enable Compression when I start to format????

 

You should use the default allocation size. You needn't check either of the quick format or enable compression options... they are exactly as they say.

Default allocation size simply refers to the smallest size a file can be. If you have a 100 byte text document and your default allocation size is 4096 bytes, then your 100 byte text document will still take up 4096 bytes on disk. Since you're mostly storing video, this doesn't really matter.

 

Actually if you know you're gonna be storing a number of large files use a larger Allocation size it's faster and has less CPU utilization.

But we're talking about ripping DVD's to images or other large files.

 

adding my 2 cents ...

there is a trade off between large and small allocation size.

large allocation size give you better performance, as stated above, but wastes hard disk space. for example: if your allocation size is 64 kbyte, even 1 byte file will occupy a 64 kbyte space on the hard disk, because that is the smallest recognizable unit to the os. so if you have a lot of small files, it's going to cost you a lot of wasted hard disk real state (technically known as "slack space").

i suggest you find a middle ground in this case. the default setting usually is good enough.