Cluster sizes

  • Thread starter Thread starter Colin Bearfield
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Colin Bearfield

With the advent of really big hard drives in home computers, I think
cluster sizes have become more relevant.

I believe that any partition over about 8Gb will take cluster sizes
over 32K. Is this true? If so, should we split drives into
partitions of 7.9Gb?

Colin
 
Colin Bearfield said:
With the advent of really big hard drives in home computers, I think
cluster sizes have become more relevant.

I believe that any partition over about 8Gb will take cluster sizes
over 32K. Is this true? If so, should we split drives into
partitions of 7.9Gb?
Click to expand...

It depends on your file system; FAT32 will have this limitation, while NTFS won't.

Jon
 
With the advent of really big hard drives in home computers, I think
cluster sizes have become more relevant.

I believe that any partition over about 8Gb will take cluster sizes
over 32K. Is this true? If so, should we split drives into
partitions of 7.9Gb?

Colin
Click to expand...

It's an issue of debate. I feel just the opposite, that as drive
capacity has become so large, it's not very significant whether a GB
or two of space is used by the larger cluser sizes, but rather the
user benefits more from the greater performance of larger clusers, and
that there is less fragmentation possibility.

Consider that when you have a HDD of (dozens of GB capacity) the
majority of the capacity won't be filled with tiny files that waste
much space when cluster sizes are large... very very few people have
THAT many tiny files.

It can make sense to partition based on fragmentation trends, or
backup strategies, or to keep separate files, separate for whatever
reason applies to those files.
It would be a real PITA to deal with THAT many <8GB partitions.
 
As others have pointed out, cluster size is not a problem with large hard drives.
FAT32 will theoretically support a 16 terabyte drive with 4 KB clusters. The default is to use larger cluster sizes as the partition sizes increases. I don't know what the default is for a 8 GB drive.
 
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