I have recently bought two external drives:
- 20 TB hard disk from Seagate (STKP20000400).
- 4 TB SSD from Kingston (SXS4000G).
Both came pre-formatted with an exFAT file system. While the Seagate HDD came formatted with a cluster size of 256 kB, which seems pretty ordinary, I was surprised to find that the Kingston SSD was pre-formatted with a cluster size of 4 MB.
While I understand the potential advantages of large cluster sizes depending on how the storage will be used, 4 MB seemed like a very large option to set as a default, assuming most people will never change it.
As I plan to also save smaller files on the drive, I considered reformatting it and reducing the cluster size. But I'm hesitant, because I'm sure Kingston didn't make this choice by rolling dice. I assume they weighed the benefits against the risk of having customer support flooded by people complaining that their 50 tiny Word documents are suddenly taking up 200 Megabytes.
Is there a general reason why it makes sense to use much larger cluster sizes on SSDs than on HDDs? Maybe something related to the memory's longevity?
