Which Block Size When Formatting?

5er driver

5er driver

5er driver

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I've formatted HDDs before with XP and earlier Windows OS and have never seen an option for Block Size. I'm not saying the option wasn't available, I’m just saying I didn't see it. Now that I have Vista 64 Home Premium I see the option to format in block sizes that range from, if I recall correctly, 128 to 4096 or even choose the "Standard" size. I forgot if the size refers to bits, bytes, KBs, or MBs, whatever. Is there an advantage or disadvantage in formatting in one size over the other? Like larger blocks for faster dives and smaller blocks for slower drives? And what is the "Standard" size"?

Thanks.

OS - Vista 64 Home Premium
CPU - Intel Q9650 4 x 3.00 GHz
HDD0 - VelociRaptor WD3000HLFS 300GB 10,000rpm
HDD1 - 'Cuda ST3250410AS 7200.10 250GB 7200rpm
MOBO - Asus P5Q-SE
RAM - Kingston PC800 8GB
Graphic Card - Gigabyte GeForce GTX280 1GB DDR3
PSU - Be Quiet! Dark Power Pro 750 Watt
Joystick - Saitek X52 Flight Controller
 
I think the larger it is the better performance you get, as the hard drive has to write to fewer blocks per file, but if you set it too large, and have lots of small files that don't fill the entire block, you will waste quite a bit of space, as there can only be one file per block. I don't know what the default is, but i imagine leaving it on default is fine. I doubt it makes much difference to performance either way.
EDIT: i think the default is 4096bytes (4k). I'd leave it on that.
 
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It's funny you should ask this, I'm just in the middle of testing a raid array and I'm looking at the sector size to use. I believe the default value is 4096bytes but I could be wrong.

I'll post my results in a bit, but at the moment what lord filbuster says is along the lines of what I'm aware of.
 
Well tried sizes from 512bytes to 64kbytes and it didn't make any difference to read speeds, not sure on write speeds though.
 
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