My basic goal is to squeeze as much speed out of my machine as possible. Mostly for kicks and for pride in building a tightly tuned and quick responding machine. Kinda like a hot rod but more nerdy! :)
all of us here are in the same club
you are correct about the stripe size part of the equation
as for cluster size; clusters are like storage boxes
the larger the clusters the more wasted space on a hard drive
for example is a data file is being written to the drive that is 300 kb and you have 64kb clusters then your data will consume 300/64 = 4.68 clusters >>>>> with your clusters being 64kb in size you will have almost one half a cluster or 32kb of space is wasted , because the rest of that cluster will never be written to
now that same 300kb file when stored on a drive with 4kb clusters = 75 clusters no wasted space / the most important part being, when a whole cluster is not used there is never alot of space wasted
hope I didnt make that too confusing
usually cluster size is determined during the partition / format phase, many software programs (boot it NG / partition magic etc etc etc) allow you to designate the cluster size of your partition prior to format execution . less wasted drive space also equates to faster defrag time and access time as well
but the whole senario is really splitting hairs for the most part >>>>> although I would avoid large clusters >>>>> thats why fat16 is all but extinct now with its 32kb cluster sizes
fat32 is also on deaths door
http://kb.iu.edu/data/ahim.html