Re-Size clusters on RAID0 partition?

[fw2004]

Hi;
I have a system running Win XP Pro Sp3 with RAID 0 on 2 drives, and non-RAID on another drive.
I have my OS on the first RAID partition. As far as I know, the cluster size is still default, which I believe is 4K for NTFS.

Would i benefit by changing the cluster size for the system drive to 32K?
If the answer is yes, is there a way to do this without having to reformat the volume and re-install the OS?

I have Partition Magic 8.0, but it will not work on RAID volumes. It does not appear that Symantec has a newer version of PM.

If I do need to reformat and re-install, would having a complete backup of the system drive help? Would restoring the backup onto the fresh install with larger cluster size produce any issues?

One reason I thought about resizing the cluster size, is that I have already done it on other volumes in the RAID system, and find that I have much less fragmentation (according to Diskeeper Pro 8.0). It would make sense that larger clusters will be more efficient for large files, but I am not sure about the effect on the system volume.

I appreciate any advice/help.

FW

 

[kimsland]

I'm just answering this part:

would having a complete backup of the system drive help? Would restoring the backup onto the fresh install with larger cluster size produce any issues?

Always best to make backups (all support will recommend this as number 1)
Restoring will Not be an issue. Especially if backups made on say DVD Media (actually any external media!)

 

[CCT]

https://www.techspot.com/vb/topic1596.html

The seek head works less moving larger blocks of data, so I would opine that the 64 or 128 would be better size.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/8059/1

 

[fw2004]

Is there a switch to use when installing Win XP to change cluster size from default?

FW

 

[CCT]

http://www.geekzone.co.nz/content.asp?contentid=6323

 

[fw2004]

Good thing I didn't do anything yet. I ran the Intel Matrix Storage Manager, and found that my RAID0 stripe size is 128K. So, there's no need to worry about cluster size.
I will however, change the cluster size on my non-raid drive once I have everything moved off of it.

FW

 

[fw2004]

Woops. I have mistaken RAID stripe size with cluster size.
When I ran a boot-time defrag, DK reported cluster size of 4096.
So, I still want to change it.