Leslie_K. Posted January 2, 2011 Share Posted January 2, 2011 I got this beauty of a pendrive for Christmas from my girlfriend and I was wondering if anyone could tell me what's the default allocation unit size it's shipped with, because I don't seem to find the correct setting. The thing is, that I want to use this pendrive as not only a storage unit but also as a Windows 7 installer (I have already done that successfully many times with my Voyager GT 4GB). When I first connected the drive to my computer and tested it with ATTO, my results were jaw-dropping great, peak write performace at 32,156 KB/s and peak read performance at 36,122 KB/s. To create a Windows 7 installation USB drive, I used the the good old commands in diskpart to create an NTFS partition with an allocation unit size of 4096 bytes. Everything's fine, the pendrive is bootable, but the write/read speeds have dropped significantly: peak write performance at 24,382 KB/s, peak read performance at 30,988 KB/s. I tried to reformat the drive to FAT32 and I played around with the allocation unit sizes, but the best results I got were 29,859 KB/s / 34,952 KB/s (write/read, respectively). The only solution to restore the factory performance is to run the firmware update utility (Corsair 32GB-64GB GTR FW Update 1_07_2.exe) and let it do its job, so this way I got the FAT32 partition back with the awesome speeds but this way I can't make the pendrive bootable... Any thoughts or advices? The best thing would be to know the allocation size unit you use to format the drives before shipping. (With diskpart I can only choose from 8192B->64KB). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
greyarea Posted January 3, 2011 Share Posted January 3, 2011 For my unit it was 64k. Hope that help. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Leslie_K. Posted January 3, 2011 Author Share Posted January 3, 2011 For my unit it was 64k. Hope that help. Yeah, I eventually figured it out myself last night. I was kinda confused with 64K since RAM Guy advised someone to use FAT32 with 4K with his GTR, but neighter diskpart, nor Windows format tool wouldn't allow me to set a so low value. Formatting the drive to FAT32 with 64K restored the great read/write performance, but with these settings the pendrive is simply not bootable, it freezes the computer when I try to boot from it. Today morning I figured it out that if I sacrifice a few MB/s of its performance, I can make the GTR bootable with FAT32 and 32K. But this way I'm back to ground zero, I lose performance. :( Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Corsair Employees RAM GUY Posted January 4, 2011 Corsair Employees Share Posted January 4, 2011 Most Microsoft O.S. will have to be on a partition formatted with 4K allocation but for best performance on these drives I would use Fat32 with 64K allocation on the format, so with that said and what you posted I think you have figured it out weather you knew it or not. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leftybob Posted February 24, 2012 Share Posted February 24, 2012 RamGuy, Is the 64k allocation also recommended for the newer Corsair Flash Voyager GT USB 3.0 - 32GB when using fat32? Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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