Exchange 2007 Block Size

Well it has been a while now since I first setup the Exchange 2007 solution for my employer. This week I found myself needing to create two new drives on the SAN for a new datastore and another for log storage. After creating the disks for the system I remembered that one of the two disks should be formatted with a different block size. But which one ... how do I find out?

Well thanks to my quick thinking when I was in class I scribbled this information in my text while listening. The disk that you store your database on should be formatted with 8192 bytes per cluster. I don't really understand how the normal person finds this out but this is what I was told in my Exchange '07 training. Now how do you find out what your bytes per cluster are on your partition?

Well if you have a week or two you can use chkdisk but I don't recomend it. It is just an absolute waste of time! Try this out.

C:\>fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo "C:\Mount Points\MBX02.12"

[some other information]

Bytes Per Cluster : 8192

[some more information]

C:\>fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo "C:\Mount Points\LOG02.12"

[some other information]

Bytes Per Cluster : 4096

[some more information]

And there you go, fast and quick way to find out what your block size is on an NTFS partition. To format the partition with a different block size just use the options in the Disk Management area in Server Manager. Well there you go, this post is more for my records because I know I will forget how to do this again in a few months :P