Allocation Unit Size (AUS) when formatting drive

Question

I'm formatting a SSD for a new node and searched here that Gavin said the typical blockchain file size was 250kb (2015), others showed 500kb (2018). I thought is was to remain constant, so perhaps one answer is wrong, then again it may be 999kb soon. When formatting you can choose your AUS if you relatively know your file size to pack it more efficiently.

The first two AUS choices are 512kb and 1024kb. I think much better choices than the default 32,768kb. Am I missing something here or am I going to achieve a rough 4-5x benefit here? Thx

Answer 1

Blocks are stored in large contiguous files (gigabytes), and are effectively append only, so they don’t really make any sort of impact on performance.

The high write cycle is in a several gigabyte leveldb database, but this is heavily write cached. Performance is almost always single core limited on any sort of fast storage given sufficient memory, rather than any other other factor.

You’ll only see storage as a factor when using magnetic media or excruciatingly slow flash storage like a SD card.