choosing a partition size for windows 10 on mac

This drive is mainly meant for storing media such as music and video.

Are there any guidelines that I might apply to other drive types Should I stop poking around and just leave it at default.

Basically, the allocation unit size is the block size on your hard drive when it formats NTFS.

If you have lots of small files, then its a good idea to keep the allocation size small so your harddrive space wont be wasted.

If you have lots of large files, keeping it higher will increase the system performance by having less blocks to seek.

The average space wasted per file will be half the chosen AUS.

However, as Jonathon points out, modern drives are massive and a little wasted space is not worth fussing over and this shouldnt be a determining factor (unless you are on a small SSD).

With a 4K AUS the data needs to be split over two blocks and they may not be together so you get fragmentation.

With a 64K AUS there are a lot fewer blocks to keep track of and less fragmentation.

For a windows boot partition I use the Windows default (which is 4K for any NTFS drive smaller than 16TB).

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Choosing A Partition Size For Windows 10 On Mac