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Tech-Archive recommends: Repair Windows Errors & Optimize Windows Performance

From: Alon Brodski (abrodski_at_012.net.il)
Date: 04/30/04 

Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2004 03:43:54 +0200

Hey!

As why I need 64K clusters....reason is simple....I don't care to lose
couple of hundreds of MB of HD space.I have 6 GB HD and it's more than
enough.I write on CR-Rs extra data that won't fit in HD
But I have an old PIII 450 MHz Dell computer with 192 MB of SDRAM. And Win
98 SE worked fine on it ,but Win XP Pro is kinda slow.So I'm considering to
add more RAM AND also by making clusters bigger I want to improve system's
overall performance.Since when I have like 300 MB of a swapfile and when you
HEAR almost constantly access to HD (which is not SCSI or superfast
EIDE,only ATA-4),and when you load from HD huge video files (like 100 MB a
piece) plus the fact that an average file's size is like over 200K....In
short....HD is a SLOW mechanical device ,vs.CPU and RAM.Therefore....less
time you have to wait for it's heads to move around looking for those small
4K clusters all over it,faster PC would work.And when you constantly
deleting and downloading from the Web huge video files,HD becomes fragmented
faster and it takes pretty long to run Defrag all the time.
Well,may be if I had the money to buy P4 3.2 GHz CPU and like 1 GB of DDR
RAM,it would be even better,but formatting is FREE!

To be honest....I didn't invent the wheel...I read about that
somewhere.Plus...it's just common sense :-)
I was suprised that noone asked for it and I couldn't find an answer
ANYWHERE!
You just read everywhere about those default 4K clusters that Windows
automatically create.
And about that command line format switch "a " option that God knows how
can be implemented in a real life.

Truly yours,
Alon.
P.S.One guy advised me to use Recovery Console,but I had a fiasco,'cos
format command there doesn't have "a" switch.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Too large filesystem?
    ... just fine with FAT32 drives of even 160GB or even 250GB. ... utilities shipped with Windows XP will not format a partition larger than ... then staying with 4KB clusters make sense. ...
    (alt.os.linux.suse)
  • Re: XP wont boot from a volume formated in WinPE 2 (Vista)
    ... I didn't use Diskpart to format, I used the Format command. ... WinPE 2 documentation but I will try it tomorrow. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.setup_deployment)
  • Re: The pendrives cannot be formatted with fat32, why?
    ... All FAT formatted volumes have clusters, ... > possibly use the number of clusters to decide which FAT format you'll ... setting up a file system. ...
    (comp.arch.embedded)
  • Re: FAT16 boot record error
    ... asks if I want to format the removable device. ... saw with my USB analyzer, the OS doesn't seem to understand the FAT boot ... whenever Windows attempts to read any sector above the implmented ones. ... FAT16 requires the device to have at least 4096 clusters ...
    (comp.arch.embedded)
  • Re: Forcing a FAT16 format onto a 4MB FAT12 CompactFlash card
    ... volumes with 4085-65525 clusters must be formatted FAT16. ... If you format with 512 byte clusters, ... Probably the definitive definition of FAT: ...
    (comp.arch.embedded)