Does the number of allocation units (at 512-bytes/sector) a Maxtor 6 L040J2
38172MB (40-billion byte, ATA-133 running 1.25.0.10 Hpt366 drivers on XP Pro
SP-1 with NTFS volumes) hard drive transfers per cycle vary inversely with
allocation unit size or is it constant? Does CPU utilization vary similarly or
is it constant?

Distilled, would setting the allocation unit to the maximum NTFS-allowed size
yield the maximum byte transfer rate? If so, any reason not to do so
(discounting "slack space" concerns)?