| AndysTechPage.com Disk Preparation Disk Clusters An article from when disks were growing and FAT/32 was king.. |
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With the phenomenal increase in hard disk sizes in recent times, the old problem of cluster sizes and disk wastage is beginning to rear its ugly head again. This was originally an issue with 2GB hard disks using FAT16, but virtually disappeared when FAT32 and ~10Gb hard drives were king. Now in early 2002 we are seeing average hard disk sizes of 40GB or more and once again, the importance of setting several smaller partitions for usability and space saving has become important. As can be seen below, various file systems have varying cluster size limitations. So what? Well it is possible to save a great deal of space by choosing the right file system. Disk space is wasted by lots of smaller files, which actually take up more space than their actual file size: each file on your hard drive uses fixed size blocks of disk space called clusters. For example, if a file is 33KB in size and the drive's cluster size is 32KB, then 31KB will be wasted, because the file will use the next 32k cluster to store its remaining 1KB
Note: FAT16 is limited to 2.1GB per partition. FAT32 (Windows 95B/C and Windows 98/SE):
 
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