Data Recovery Weekly

it's been 10 years and I've yet to hear of a filesystem that uses multiple cluster sizes on the same volume. Otoh, I don't see what benefit that could possibly give. With multiple cluster sizes on the same volume, you can do tailpacking . Ext-series filesystems had a different block and fragment size, but never actually used it. Quite possible that was removed in ext4, although I'm not really sure. OLE Structured Storage actually uses two different block sizes (small block and big block).

On Tom’s hardware forum mdk4ever asks what is the best cluster size? He's got a new 2 TB Western Digital hard drive and wants to set the optimal cluster size while formatting the drive. The rule of thumb is “ Always use the default cluster size ”. The performance gain from changing the cluster size, if any, is not noticeable. One can speculate that the GUI option to change the cluster size if in itself a legacy from the days of floppy drives . If you change the cluster size you may encounter unexpected side effects (did you know that NTFS compression off for cluster size greater than 4KB?). Another consideration is that when you need to recover data it is much convenient to deal with the default cluster size values. Data recovery software can either calculate the default cluster size (for HFS) or look it up in the table of standard sizes (for FAT, NTFS). Non-default cluster size needs to be determined by the complex techniques. So, we recommend that you always stick to the defaul...