Setting Drive Allocation Unit Size With PowerShell

There seems to be some ongoing debate around whether or not formatting your data and log drives with 64KB allocation unit size even matters anymore. I would encourage you to do your own research to determine if you want to do this or not. My personal take on it is: if it doesn’t hurt, and it may help, and it only takes 2 seconds to click the “go” button on my PowerShell script, then I would rather go ahead and do it and not need it than not do it and wish I had later down the road.

So, when I am setting up a new server, I do format the data and log drives with 64KB allocation unit size. Here is a handy PowerShell script I use for checking the allocation unit size of a drive, and another one for reformatting it to 64KB. This can be run against a single server, or multiple servers as shown below.