Is this possible?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Worren
  • Start date Start date
W

Worren

Can I make a bootable cd that will allow me to format all
my hard drives with a 512k cluster size instead of
window's default. Smaller cluster sizes mean better
performance. What files would I need on the cd to format
in NTFS prior to doing a clean install?
Thanks in advance.
 
Do you really mean 512K? That would mean every file would occupy a
minimum of
half a megabyte, very wasteful. If you meant to say 512 bytes, then
drive size would be
limited to 1 Gigabyte. If you're talking about changing NTFS then no
there isn't any
way to do it that I'm aware of.
You don't need anything to do a clean NTFS install, it's all on the XP
CDRom.
 
My bad. Of course I meant 512 bytes. Would that actually
limit the size of the drive or would the entire drive be
formatted at 512 bytes per sector? Reason I asked is
because I added a 80 gig WD HDD to an already running
system and formatted it under system properties and it
went all the way. Now I want to boot up off cd or disk and
format all 3 drives to 512 then do a fresh install.
 
The actual sector size is normally 512 bytes, but the
allocation units (cluster size) vary. I assumed you were speaking
of allocation units. Recheck your 80Gig drive, I'm
sure you'll find 4KB if NTFS or 32MB for FAT32. As far as I know
just formatting a drive produces 512 byte sectors.
 
512 byte cluster size is NOT good for performance. It DOES reduce "slack
space", but it'll slow down your NTFS drive something terrible. And the
MFT overhead is gross.

NTFS "likes" 4K clusters best. Performance will be best too, since
that'll match up w/ the cache unit size and swap unit size. XP's Disk
Manager will always default to 4K size, override it only if you're very
very sure.

FAT32 drives w/ 512 byte clusters are pretty wasteful too, and it limits
the partion size to something like 1GB.
 
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