I partitioned my new 75 gig drive with fdisk into one primary partition at 30 gb, and one extended at 45 gig (with 1 logical drive).
Anyway, I booted up into win2k and went to the disk manager - clicked format, picked fat32 as a type, and picked 4096 (4k) as a cluster size.
From what I recall reading a while back, 4k clusters were about ideal for fat32 - but that may not be the most efficient setting anymore with large drives.
Anyway - it starts formatting, I watch it go through 3% or something - and I went off to go eat. At some point (not sure if it was in the middle or at the end), an error window popped up that said “Cluster size too small.” and that’s when I came back. So I closed that, and the drive was unformatted.
So here’s the question: What caused that? Is there some inherent limit to the size of drives you can format with 4k clusters? I’m thinking that perhaps the formatting table can only hold X clusters, and therefore, to use smaller (4k) clusters, you’re limited to a certain size drive - and for a 30 gb drive, you’d need a larger cluster size. Is that how it works, or is it something else entirely?
Well, after some more research, it would seem that my guess is right. The formatting table can only hold X clusters, and so you need to divide the size of the partition by X to find out how big the clusters need to be.
It would seem that 16k clusters are good up to 32 gig, and 32k clusters are needed after that. Is that correct? Is it worth making 3 partitions rather than 2 in order to keep each under 32 gig to use 16k clusters?
And one last question: Is there any difference in the way NTFS is setup? Does it allow larger clusters per disk space, or anything?
When you use smaller clusters you obviously need more of them to cover the entire partition. When you have more clusters you need a larger file allocation table to keep track of them. You don’t want too large a file allocation table, because that is very inefficient. But large clusters can also be inefficient, of course. FAT32 was a hack to make Windows 9x support slightly larger drives than FAT16 was designed for. It simply doesn’t work well with large partitions.
NTFS works differently and you probably don’t need/want to tinker with its default settings (this means you’ll usually use 4k clusters with NTFS). NTFS do have many advantages over FAT32, and you should (IMHO) steer clear of FAT32 unless you absolutely must have access to the files on the partition from Windows 9X or (god forbid) DOS.
If you’re not doing dual boot with win98/me, why are even bothering with fat32? NTFS is much better.
Yes. NTFS stores a lot of information as files, not on absolute sectors of the HDD. This means that the file sizes can change as opposed to FAT32.
Hidden system files, that is.
This is not true in general. FAT is much simpler and will be a bit faster for small partitions, especially with little RAM for caching and slow disc access times (ie older computers). There are lots of factors affecting speed for both file systems, but on modern systems NTFS will usually be somewhat faster than FAT.