Nokia N95

benuk · #1 06-05-2008, 01:54 PM

Hi,

Does anyone know the default cluster size for mass memory on the nokia n95 8gb? and if I can change it by formatting to speed up access?

thanks in advance..

mcbain · #2 06-05-2008, 02:08 PM

I'm pretty sure i've seen a thread around here about seperating the mass memory into sectors. Have you tried a search?

benuk · #3 06-05-2008, 03:57 PM

Yes, I had looked, but anything seemed to be in reference to a memory card for the original nokia n95, not the 8gb internal memory.. but I may have missed it!!

jkoppee · #4 06-05-2008, 04:04 PM

why would you want to change the cluster size on a Solid state memory? You really aren't going to get any speed increase on the device

benuk · #5 06-06-2008, 09:42 AM

Can I be so bold as to ask why? When I increased the cluster size on my microSD card (which is also flash based) it increased the speed quite noticeably.

I assumed that the 8gb memory on the n95 8gb would operate in a similar way as it is also flash based.

Larger cluster sizes would decrease the memory management overhead.

There may be more involved in this that I am not aware of, as I am basing this on my experience of regular hard drives and the microSD card I mentioned above.

thanks

jkoppee · #6 06-09-2008, 12:50 PM

The first thing I will point out is that SSD (solid state drives, i.e. flash) work completely different from a normal hard drive. Things such as defragmenting and changing cluster sizes affect spinning hard drives a lot more because the fact that data has to be looked for by moving parts and this seek time can be affected by many different factors. Flash memory doesn't have this problem because of the lack of moving parts and the way things are written and read to and from the media. That being said larger cluster sizes can affect the speed a slight amount when writing large amounts of data to the card but doesn't neccessarliy help with small amounts. This is because as you stated the lack of some overhead. If you are writing a large block of data then the fewer clusters required the better. You really won't notice much if any difference though when writing and reading small amounts of data constantly and not all flash based media will support changing the cluster size. The controller using the memory has to be capable of handling this change and the built in memory controller for the 8gig might be fixed but I don't know personally if it is or not.