Hello. I'm about the setup SnapRAID and have a couple of questions after reading through the FAQ on NTFS block size.
My 4TB drives are currently formatting with 8K block size. I'm only storing video files on the drives and the average file size is 1.1G.
Is there any issue with using 8K block size on the data disks?
Is there any issue with using 8K block size on the parity disks?
Can the block sizes be different between data and parity disks?
In the FAQ it says "But take care that using a bigger block size will also increase the amount of wasted space in the parity files."
What is the wasted space issue? I'm willing to move my data and recreate the partition with a different block size if need be.
Thanks!
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Hello. I'm about the setup SnapRAID and have a couple of questions after reading through the FAQ on NTFS block size.
My 4TB drives are currently formatting with 8K block size. I'm only storing video files on the drives and the average file size is 1.1G.
Is there any issue with using 8K block size on the data disks?
Is there any issue with using 8K block size on the parity disks?
Can the block sizes be different between data and parity disks?
In the FAQ it says "But take care that using a bigger block size will also increase the amount of wasted space in the parity files."
What is the wasted space issue? I'm willing to move my data and recreate the partition with a different block size if need be.
Thanks!
You are conflating two different types of blocks. But filesystem blocks (NTFS) are not at all related to the blocks that SnapRAID uses.
SnapRAID will work with any size of filesystem blocks that you wish, 8K or any other size.
As for SnapRAID blocks, you should probably just use the default size of 256KiB.
Gotcha - thanks for clarifying that. So it doesn't matter what the filesystem blocks are set to on data or parity drives. That is good to hear!
I'm not sure on what you're trying to optimize by using 8k instead of the 4k default NTFS block size, but it won't hurt either :)