Hacking clustersize of exfat formatted sd card: do they matter?

[Trappie]

title, options are 16 kb to 32000 kb, what's the advised size for SX OS?

 

[dsrules]

microsoft says the default for exfat is 128KB, not sure what difference it makes with other sizes

 

[DarkLinkRises]

Xci-cutters latest commit says 32k, not sure if that helps?

 

[thealgorithm]

Or just format to exfat using switch and use a tool to check what cluster size it formatted it to.. Then in future use that same cluster size when formatting

 

[guily6669]

Switch uses 128KB (SanDisk Ultra 128GB A1 reported by other users), but it might be just depending on the card settings as Switch like windows probably read SD factory settings and use it automatically.

The more the cluster size, usually it gives a better performance specially to write speed, but the best is probably to use the native setting.

Also the higher you chose, small files will waste more space, though most likely we wont have much little files on the M-SD for the Switch so you won't end with much lost space...

ps: Just try the maximum, if its working worse, use default settings...

 

[moe-joe]

This depends on what you want to do. If you want to play split files with SX OS, use 32kb as max.
If you use homebrew and have many small files, use lower, if you have only some huge files use bigger cluster size.
But that's not really important (if you don't use the split files). It's just a little more/less performance and maybe a waste of space (if you have 32kb cluster size, a 1kb file use 32kb, a 33kb file use 64kb...)

 

[Mr. Wizard]

Your smallest file will always use the minimum block size.

So if your block size is 64k and all your files are 1k, each 1k file will use 64k of space. That's a lot of wasted space the more files you have.

If you are going to store a bunch of small things you want the smallest container possible. Quite the opposite if you are storing large things.

This is why "size on disk" is sometimes reported as different than "actual size".

For storing many large isos you want to choose the largest block size possible.

When you format a disk there is a default chosen because they don't know what the hell you are storing on there.

 

[guily6669]

Thats more for OS... thats why a PC is never recommended to just use the biggest one as there are thousands and thousands and more thousands of files of all kind of sizes...

On the Switch there probably wont be much lost space by using a big cluster size as most files will be big like the game cart emulated or digital...

 

[Yasars]

I have set 128k on exfat ... Any many time sxos.is games are freezing is that the problem? Must i format to 32k ? I have dont under stund this sry..

 

[xYuunax]

just use the default allocation size... the 32k is for ppl that are formatting to fat32 and having to use split files. (XCI cutter)

if you use anything other than default, the card can read/write slower.

 

[guily6669]

I have set 128k on exfat ... Any many time sxos.is games are freezing is that the problem? Must i format to 32k ? I have dont under stund this sry..

Leave it at 128, that's probably the biggest standard for XC mSD cards, lower might have slightly less performance and going bigger might give a small edge, but only on certain devices depending on what you want, I would leave it at 128K...

 

[Wierd_w]

Cluster size should be either exactly the same as the erase unit size, or a whole multiple of the erase unit size.

Good luck finding out what that erase unit size is. You will need to probe the medium with something like flashbench and do some guess work.

You *WILL* find a very noticeable performance increase from using the correct cluster size with flash media.