Alright then, I've done a search and found a posting the last one here posted by cgkanchi that suggests you can use a different block size for the NTFS file system, however, I can not find any posts that suggest how to do this.

I do know it's possible, from typing format /? in a command shell, to format with a different block size, using /A:blocksize. Indeed, cgkanchi seems to be inaccurate as the help screen suggets block sizes of 512 (Default), 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, (all in bytes) 16K, 32K, and 64K are supported by NTFS.


What I'm aiming for:

I'm building a new PC. I want my system disc to be a RAID 0 array (Striped), with a small block size. The smallest I can choose in the BIOS RAID setup is 4K blocks. So to optimise disk access I want to install an NTFS formated filesystem with an 8K block size. This will mean each block will be held accross both disks in the RAID 0 array.


The problem:

XP Pro install disk doesn't allow me to specify the block size of the NTFS filesystem. How do I get around this?


Possible solutions:

Use the six floppy boot disk set from Microsoft?
Create a XP boot disk but boot to a command prompt and format from there?


Any help would be much appreciated.