Are 64K Blocks Ever A Bad Idea?

[Savage1701]

I've got a couple of drives that I reformatted from 4K to 64K block size. It seems as if maybe the 64K block drives are allowing some tiling or stutter on shows whose channel strengths are pegging the signal meter, but that might not be the fault of the drive.

Are they any scenarios where 64K block size is NOT preferred?

And no, I don't run any auto defragmentation programs. I tried that once and everything was tiled and stuttered. Those programs passed their trial period and were uninstalled.

Any thoughts are appreciated.

[valnar]

Yes, I would go with the default 4K for your C: drive. There are many more small files with your OS.

[blade]

As valnar said, the only downside is on a drive such as the C drive or any other drive with lots of files smaller than 64k.

Signal strength being too high and 64k drives have nothing to do with one another.

You don't need to defrag recording drives anyway. Some people will tell you that they have to or they have stuttering. These people IMO have other issues that are requiring them to defrag. There are far too many people who don't defrag who don't have problems.

[paulbeers]

With 64k recording drives, I have never defragged (current drives have been in use for well over a year with multiple shows recording to them each day).

Any more, I use 64K formatted drives for all my strorage drives (even my picture/document/etc storage drives). The C: is the only one still on 4K blocks.

[Savage1701]

OK, I appreciate the replies. I should have been more specific that only my video storage drives are 64K; my c: drive, which is for the system only, is 4K default.

I'm thinking this is more a RAID controller issue. I'm getting some intermittent tiling and corruption on shows, and wondering if the cache attempts to dump to the drive but overfows before the drive can finish its writes, etc., especially if Sage is writing and reading multiple streams from multiple drives. I may just be asking too much of my setup, although I have tried to split my drives between the ICH10R controller and the 3Ware one. Maybe in my setup 2-3 shows recording while another is being watched is just too much to ask.

The singal strength on the shows seems strong enough, and shows don't stutter when live. And again, recording problems are sparse, but they are there nonetheless.

Well, I'll keep digging around.

Thanks for the opinions.

[stanger89]

To the original question the only time you don't want to use large clusters is if you're going to be storing lots of files smaller than the cluster size on the disk, and then only because it's inefficient (only whole clusters can be allocated).

Regarding your signal issue, I don't really know, I'd check CPU usage, maybe disk usage (perfmeter).

[MattHelm]

Originally Posted by Savage1701

(1) KWorld ATSC-110, (1) 950Q USB, (1) 2250 tuner, (1) PVR USB2, (1) HD-PVR using USB-UIRT, (1) 1600 Dual card, (1) DVICO Fusion 5 Gold, (1) Hauppauge 1250, (1) Hauppauge 1250, 8 various storage HD's, NEC-based x1 USB add-on card, 2 outdoor antennas capturing 2 different OTA markets, Charter Cable.

From the list of your tuners, I hope you have a good distribution amp like this one:

http://www.cabletvamps.com/Products/EDA-FT08300.htm

Between the incoming cable and the tuners. Also make sure to terminate ALL unused outputs. Reflections can cause all kind of problems with QAM and ATSC signals.

[Savage1701]

Matt:

Thanks as well. Yes, I have a good splitter/dist. amp., as the antennas were professionally installed and I told them I wanted good stuff. The antenna was actually so big the installer made me promise I would split the signal multiple times because he was worried I'd overload on signal strength, escpecially if I re-aimed it at the closer of the 2 markets I live in.

I'm really leaning more towards hard drive issues at this point, given that one of my drives was new and mostly empty, so Sage, rightly so, tried to write to it the most to balance it out. I think this caused further problems, as that drive was being read from the most as well, since many new shows were on it. I used the "moving your files" sticky, which went fine, and balanced out all the hard drives to have roughly equal available space on them, as we can have as many as 4 shows recording at once, and actually even more if there is any padding.