Hard Drive Setup - Allocation Unit Size

I'm adding on 2 one tb HDD's.
when formatting i'm wondering what the performance gain and size loss would be of using 8192 bytes instead of the default(4096) allocation unit size.
i've got 3 one tb HDD's and 4 tb of external storage now but i use a lot of space editing 4-10 hours of multi camera footage at a time and im terrible at cleaning up after myself, hah, so I'm not sure if i have enough overall space to dedicate each one for media, page file, etc... at least for now they will all be general purpose use
any thoughts on the effects of using 8192 over 4096?
thanks

By your own admission, cleaning up is not one of your fortes. This probably means that there are a lot of preview files left on your disk as well and these tend to be rather small. Increasing the allocation units as you call them will create more slack space and result in wasted space, sucking up your disk space very quickly. I do not think you will gain anything, on the contrary, you will probably lose space and performance. If you look at your preview files, you will see a lot of XMP and MPGINDEX files that are all 4 KB max and by changing the allocation unit to 8 K most of these files will have between 75 and 50% slack space (not used for data but reserved) and you will run out of disk space much quicker. Personally I would not change the default NTFS allocation.

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IMac Hard Drive Setup Recommendations/ Thunderbolt

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[Moved to Hardware forum.]

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Hi There,
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0,00%
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0,00%
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0,00%
0,00%
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0,00%
0,00%
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Message was edited by: TC_MACPRO
Message was edited by: TC_MACPRO

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Basic Backup
Get an external Firewire drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):
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2. Toast
3. Impression
4. arRSync
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Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance, optimization, virus protection, and backup and restore. Also read How to Back Up and Restore Your Files.
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Cool Drives
OWC
WiebeTech
Firewire Direct
California Drives
NewEgg
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Hard Drive Setup - Allocation Unit Size

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