i think larger cluster size if better if you will only be storing large files like music files. if however, there will be smaller files on there, your disk could end up being more fragmented. I believe this is the way it ultimately came out. Here's the best post i could find summarizing it:
"Let me shed some light on the cluster issue, including the pros and cons of
larger cluster sizes.
First, some basics. Hard drives are made up of individual areas called
sectors. Under current file systems, these are not used directly and
instead clusters are used. A cluster is made up of one or more
sectors. When you set the cluster size, you set the minimum allocation
unit that will be used for file storage. The file allocation table (FAT)
then keeps track of the clusters that a given file uses.
Larger cluster sizes means that your hard drive will spend more time
reading data out of the current cluster than going to find out where the
next cluster is. If you double your cluster size, it stands to reason the
number of FAT queries is cut in half. From a physical standpoint, every
time you move to a new cluster, you are possibly in another physical
location on your hard drive, requiring a head seek that takes time to
execute (8-11ms is common with today's high speed hard drives). Optimally,
your cluster size should be set to reflect your normal data usage. That
is, if you tend to work with 32k chunks of data, then a 32k cluster size is
optimal. However, we all know that different applications use data
differently.
For use with large data files, it is best to use larger cluster sizes. For
lots of small files, it's best to have smaller cluster sizes.
However, this leads to the problem with larger cluster sizes, namely
increased slack. Slack is simply the unused space resulting from the
storage of a small file (say 100 bytes) in a larger cluster (say 32k). 31k
of your disc is unused, though shown as allocated by the file system. So
when you increase the cluster size, you will increase the amount of room
required to store your existing files (and any future small files you may
store).
Particular to NTFS, any cluster size over 4k will disable the built-in file
compression. According to the source I used, 4k is the standard for NTFs
partitions.
The best compromise would be to create a separate audio data partition on
your hard drive, leave the cluster size at default for your OS and apps,
and increase the cluster size in your audio partition. 32k or 64k sounds
reasonable to me.
References of note include:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/index.htmhttp://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/file/clust.htmlGreg Teltschik"