Re: Cluster size ? - experience

Ken, I do remember the day when I bought a 245 MB Maxtor drive for $400 and
it had multiple partitions for the very purpose you stated.

The system allocation space in NTFS (what in Fat file system is called The
FAT) will grow whenever you reduce the cluster size because it needs to have
the physical real estate reserved to keep track of all the cluster
information.

Granted that the storage area itself will have more physical clusters and
less area used by each individual file but the Reserved System Space (his
original "72 MB in formatting") will grow. I have checked this area a
couple of times by formatting a few new drives of different sizes with 2K
clusters, running Executive Software's Diskeeper (and some other programs)
to see the system reserve size (allocation space) and then reformatting with
the default 4k clusters. The system reserve size was almost half the size
with 4k clusters than with 2k clusters.

"Ken Blake, MVP" <kblake@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:al1g73t28lta7hifiduub55mpv3qqf4for@xxxxxxxxxx
On Mon, 18 Jun 2007 22:37:42 -0400, "LVTravel" <noone@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:


"Rock" <Rock@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:OjD8N7gsHHA.4800@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"- Bobb -" wrote
I've got a few new disks and while debating on how to partition them,
also thinking of arranging my old " Archive partition" by size. This
partitioned area is only for a library - not used normally for disk IO
during normal system operation, so it's utilization of space I'm
watching
not disk IO speed. It's about 175gb now and when I check properties,
I
can see avg filesize is only 1mb. I do have a lot of larger folders
there
too, but some of the older folders are copies of old CDs or previous
pc
folders that have a lot of 1 kb files in there - bringing that "
average"
down to 1mb. I just made a few partititons and on a 235 gb
partition -
with 4kb clusters (default), it's already used 72mb in formatting and
I
haven't "wasted" space with any of my stuff yet. So to not waste so
much
space on the new drives for old/small stuff, I'm thinking of making a
portion formatted as 2kb sectors and then for the large files /
obvious
backups etc ( 10mb/ 20 mb+ ? files) using ... say 64kb clusters. I've
been reading similiar questions via google, and don't want to start a
fight about what's "best",
http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic18335.html
just asking for others that set it up with small/large clusters - was
it
worth it ? Less waste ?



To add to the other post, at the current cost of hard drive space, that
72MB is costing about 2 cents.

--
Rock [MS-MVP User/Shell]


And correct me someone if I am wrong but with a 2K cluster size, the size
of
the System area (the 72 MB now showing) will increase dramatically when
it
doubles the amount of clusters (4K to 2K) to store that cluster
information.


If I understand correctly what you're saying, no, you have it
backwards. The smaller the cluster size, the less space is used.

That's because, on the average, every file wastes roughly half of its
last cluster. So the total waste is roughly the number of files
multiplied by half the cluster size.

But having a non-standard cluster size is generally not a good thing
to do. A smaller cluster size hurts performance because more clusters
have to be read. And as Rock points out, the disk space savings are
trivial.

Back in the DOS/Windows 3.x days, when drives were small and
expensive, people used to partition their drives into many pieces, not
for organizational reasons, but because smaller partitions resulted in
smaller cluster size. They would therefore waste less of their
precious small hard drive space. Today, with our large cheap drives,
it makes no sense to do this, or to use smaller clusters.

--
Ken Blake, Microsoft MVP Windows - Shell/User
Please Reply to the Newsgroup


.

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