Will wrote:
"Maxim S. Shatskih" wrote in message
...
Boot a stand-alone Linux CD that supports your SATA adapter and then run
a
large 'dd' directly from the raw drive device. Something like:
# time `dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/null bs=32k count=1000000`
Playing with "bs" is also a good idea. (S)ATA protocol has a natural block
size
of 64K.

So if you were going to be copying large files to a single SATA device,
would using a Windows "Allocation Unit" of 64K when formatting the drive
make any sense?

On SATA drives I've generally seen the throughput maximize when I make
Windows allocation units 8K, and performance degrades a bit at 16K and 32K.
I haven't tried 64K.

Any reasonably-competent Copy function will preallocate the entire
output file prior to initiating the data copying, so the allocation unit
size should be irrelevant (unless the free space on the disk is severely
fragmented).

- bill