Once every couple of years or so Microsoft provides me with a new laptop. This time around it was a Lenovo W510 with a quad proc (8x if you count Hyper-Threading) with 16 GB of RAM. Although the machine came with a standard 7200 RPM drive I already had two SSD drives which I plopped into the machine within minutes. Because I was moving data around and wanted to optimize things if I could on disk I wanted to look at the allocation size I used to format the SSD drives to see if I could not eek out any additional performance. Using the secondary drive as my test I formatted the OCZ 120 GB drive using the minimum, default, and maximum allocation sizes available.
I then used the ATTO Disk Benchmark tool to test each configuration. As you can see there is really no major deviations between the 3 however the 512 byte allocation size doesn’t kick as much on the low to mid end. As for the larger allocation size I saw nothing that was compelling enough to make that move especially given the slack space tax I would be paying for that configuration when smaller files are stored on disk. So in the end I went with the default allocation size for my SSD drives.
| 512 bytes (min) | 4096 bytes (default) | 64k bytes (max) |
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