The best cluster size for 10GB is 4K?

[patrick99]

Partition Magic can also set a 10GB FAT32 partition even to 2K cluster size. But is it ideal to set 4K?

How about a 10GB NTFS then?

Thanks.

 

[linney]

Cluster Size.

This is the smallest amount of hard disk space a file can occupy. Floppies have a cluster size of 512 bytes and hard disks can have a cluster size ranging from 1 kilobyte to 16 kilobytes (sometimes even more). The larger the partition, the larger the cluster size. See Slack Space.

Slack Space.

The amount of disk space that is wasted by having a large cluster size. For example, if a 300-byte file is stored on a disk with a cluster size of 1,024 bytes, there will be 724 bytes of slack space that can't be used for any other files.


How to Locate and Correct Disk Space Problems on NTFS Volumes in Windows XP(Q315668)

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;315688&FR=1&PA=1&SD=HSCH

The Default Cluster Size for the NTFS and FAT File Systems(Q314878)

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q314/8/78.asp

Files Are Larger on FAT Partitions(Q101267)

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q101/2/67.asp

 

[bcastner]

Linney,

In your second link it states: "If you use the Convert utility to convert a volume from FAT to NTFS, Windows always uses a 512-byte cluster size."

This used to be true, but was corrected beginning with Win2k. Any volume over 2 gigabytes will use 4k clusters with CONVERT.