Optimise HD File System

It can be useful to optimize the contiguous file allocation size for the file system if you use disk intensive applications. You may not notice a difference but it is probably worthwhile doing anyway.
The larger the drive, the greater the size allocated.

Backup the Registry, run RegEdit, and locate the Key below

Key: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet
\Control\FileSystem]

In the right pane, create a new DWORD Value Name and call it ContigFileAllocSize

Give ContigFileAllocSize a Value Data of

200 or 400 or 800 or 1000 (KB values in Hexadecimal)

OR

512 or 1024 or 2048 or 4096 (KB equivalent in Decimal)

A good all round size is 4096, that is waht I use. This will help the drive from defragmenting during IO operations.

XP compliant? I can't remember b/c I have used this tweak b4.....

all M$ OS's...................even XP, I am using it on mine now with NTFS.........................which brings about another point................



Cluster Size....what do you think the best size is?

I have read a lot on this, and some think to have it set large as it increases speed.......well, read speed yes, but write speed np since it causes too much defragging as the large cluster size is usually wasted space. The second school of thought is to set it as small as possible in order to save space.

Well, this is what I have done....I have set all of my drives, all on NTFS, to 4096. I have all the drives partitioned into no larger partitions of 12 gigs, average of 8 gigs. I uses 4096 because that is the automatic cluster size that RAM is formatted to. My RAM size is 2 gigs. By having all drives set to the same cluster size as my RAM, I am saving CPU cycles as the CPU does not have to constantly convert the cluster size as it pages the RAM and HD's.............seems to have provided me with extra stability and speed....................but, hey, that's just my opinion..........