I'm going to be loading my new 3TB drive with large files on Windows, and then hooking it up to my Linux server. This is the first time I've done this.
I've been told that both Windows and Linux support the NTFS file system.
After initializing the disk (obviously as GPT), however, I'm currently in the process of formatting the partition on Windows, but am unsure as to how much disk space I should allocate for the Allocation Unit Size if I plan to use it on both Windows and Linux.
Should I set this to something other than default?
The options are as follows:
- Default
- 512
- 1024
- 2048
- 4096
- 8192
- 16K
- 32K
- 64K
What is my best bet?
2 Answers
You can never go wrong with sticking with the default. 4kb is the default block size used by most filesystems. You can shave a bit of overhead if you mostly store larger files by using a larger block size, but generally you should stick with the default/4k. Worst case there is that you waste a relatively small amount of disk space.
6I found this short article which explains that the Allocation Unit Size (AUS) is basically the size of blocks on the hard drive. So clearly, if I plan to use store large files (1GB+), I should be using the largest AUS (64K).
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