Impact of RAID Stripes Larger than Windows 2000 Allocation Units

  • Thread starter Thread starter Will
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Will

What is the impact of having a RAID system stripe data at a size
that is a multiple larger than the Windows 2000 file allocation
unit size? Windows 2000 apparently doesn't like to have
allocation units larger than 4K. When I tried doing this, I
found out that defragmentation tools stopped working, my backup
program Backup Exec 10.0 would randomly hang while reading or
writing a large disk, and Windows 2000's boot sector would be
trashed on every reboot of the machine.

I'm therefore "stuck" with the standard Windows 2000 4K file
allocation unit for NTFS file systems. But the RAID system I am
building that NTFS volume on has a stripe size that goes from 8K
to 128K. I cannot select 4K. What are the implications of
having the stripe be larger than the NTFS allocation unit?

As a note, my application for this volume requires reading huge
numbers of 42K files rapidly in sequence.
 
Will said:
What is the impact of having a RAID system stripe data at a size
that is a multiple larger than the Windows 2000 file allocation
unit size? Windows 2000 apparently doesn't like to have
allocation units larger than 4K. When I tried doing this, I
found out that defragmentation tools stopped working, my backup
program Backup Exec 10.0 would randomly hang while reading or
writing a large disk, and Windows 2000's boot sector would be
trashed on every reboot of the machine.

I'm therefore "stuck" with the standard Windows 2000 4K file
allocation unit for NTFS file systems. But the RAID system I am
building that NTFS volume on has a stripe size that goes from 8K
to 128K. I cannot select 4K. What are the implications of
having the stripe be larger than the NTFS allocation unit?

As a note, my application for this volume requires reading huge
numbers of 42K files rapidly in sequence.
Click to expand...

RAID stripe size and NTFS cluster size are totally different things.
Irrespective of what some self-styled "experts" may say, there's no real
throughput improvement to be gained by trying to match stripe size to
cluster size.

Leave cluster size at the Windows default.
Set your stripe size to 64K.
All systems will work at their optimum.
 
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