Well now that I got a new hard drive, I was thinking about partitioning and selecting cluster size for each partition.

After reading a while, I decided that the "system" partition, where Windows, OpenOffice, programs and stuff will have the default cluster size, while my other partition where I have all my music will have the biggest cluster size. Though I sacrifice a little space, seems that this is better. It's yet hard to benchmark it to see if there is any difference.

Do you guys have any experience with this?

I have never changed the cluster size on any partition of any of my HDDs. It just seems to me that the default settings are the best (and not wanting to mess with a thing I know works). So if I were you I would leave the cluster sizes as they are.

clusters for all reasonable purposes do not affect the overall performance that much. Larger clusters do allow for a slight increase in read time and causes less fragmentation, but depding on the size of files you could be wasting quite a bit of space. In short the cluster size defines the smallest piece of your hard drive that a file is allowed to use.

Example:
saving a 7KB file.
*cluster size will be a multiple of two (2^#)
cluster size of 4KB -> you need 2 clusters wasting 1KB
cluster size of 32KB -> you need 2 cluster,but you just wasted 25KB

*If your files are likely to expand, say programming files on an on going large project a larger cluster size for that partition may be better, or if one segment hold larger files on average. Other than that, the default is a default for a reason. There have been tests done showing that the default cluster size is appropriate for most cases.

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</Dream In Code>
-William. § (marvin_gohan)

I remember when cluster size optimization was important back when we had 20 mb hard drives.

With 250gb hard drives going for $80, you're better off focusing on tweaking something else on your computer.

In terms of disk I/O, the parameters you should really look into is rpm, built-in caching, as well as what kind of interface technology its using (i.e. SATA, Firewire, USB 2.0, IDE, etc.)

Regardless, partitioning your HD was a good move, leaving the OS in its own partition should help minimize fragmentation.