I don't know if this approach is applicable to your situation or not, but it sounds like performance is important enough that a lot of hassle might be ok. If true, then I would try adjusting things such that the file system will always read a minimum of 64KB no matter what.

The way to do this is by adjusting what Microsoft calls the cluster size, what other vocabularies call the extent size. This the smallest unit of storage that NTFS will read/write on the disk and it will be contiguous. Doing this requires that you make a special logical drive and format it using the /A: option to the format command:
FORMAT <drive>: /FS:NTFS /A:<clustersize>
clustersize = 65536, that is the maximum size

So this drive is used like any other, except that every file it on it will take a minimum of 64K of space on the disk (even for a 1 byte file).

I have not benchmarked this on Windows NTFS, but I have on other OS/ file systems. I predict significant performance gains.

In reply to Re^3: Configurable IO buffersize? by Marshall
in thread Configurable IO buffersize? by BrowserUk

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