I’m trying to understand how allocation unit size affects the performance of my WD 8TB drive. Could formatting it with an incorrect size lead to slower speeds or inefficient space usage? I’d appreciate any tips on choosing the ideal allocation unit size for a large drive like this!
Hi @jacky_sin
Have you checked our knowledge base articles?
(Support for Western Digital Hard Drives | Western Digital)
Try this one.
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The allocation unit size affects storage and speed. Smaller sizes work better for small files but can slow down large file handling. Larger sizes speed up large files but may waste space with small files. For an 8TB drive, 64KB or 128KB is best for performance, especially with large files.
On average you will waste half an allocation unit per file. If, for example, you have 1 million files and a 128KB allocation unit, then the total wasted space would be 64GB.
