Re: 2 large hard drive questions

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I just checked my 250 which I just did a plain format using NTFS from Disk management and it says
that the clusters are 4 K. Your recollection is correct to the way clusters are used. The use of
partitions is strictly personal now, I personally use 4 different disks and each has 1 partition. 2
40's, 250, and 320.
--
Dave Vair
CNE, CNA, MCP, A+, N+

"djc" <noone@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:OB8XzjY3GHA.3464@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
thank you Jonny and David. That definitely clears up the 232.88 GB for me.

However, on the cluster issue, I was wondering what effect cluster size would have on these big
drives. I did install my OS on its own partition, about 40GB and then formated the rest of the
drive on another partition using disk manager. Thats when I thought about whether or not I should
use the default cluster size, as I usually do, or not? It didn't matter much in the past with
smaller drives but I was thinking that in the same way the manufacturers use of 1000 instead of
1024 is *much* more apparent now with the *big* drives that this too (cluster size), may be much
more significant now? maybe using a smaller size gains you significantly more usable space now? If
I remember correctly the smallest unit of storage on the formated disk is equal to the cluster
size, which is a component of file system, rather than physical hard drive. So if for example you
have a 16K cluster size and you save a 17K file to the partition, it actually takes up 32K of
space.

If my memory is correct, I think I just answered my own question. I would think smaller cluster
size *would* have a much bigger impact now, in general. It does depend on the types/sizes of files
being saved on the partition.

Am I remembering correctly? what do ya think?

"Jonny" <spamyourself@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:eUOjnMY3GHA.4924@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"djc" <noone@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:e%23vqWrX3GHA.1588@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I just installed a 250GB drive (WD WD2500JB). No problems with BIOS or OS (xp sp2) recognizing
and using the drive, supports 48bit LBA.

However,

1) I noticed that Disk Manager in Windows XP SP2 reports the disk as 232.88 GB? I know that the
'marketing' number on the box of the drives is not exact and when you do the actual math there
are differences between the 'marketing' number and the 'real' number (largely due to
manufacturers using 1000 instead of the proper 1024 bytes = 1 KB). I can't think of how to work
this out at the moment to see if that is all my descrepency is, or if there is something else
wrong here. I'm used to working with 20-40 GB drives where these differences did not amount to
much so I know when going to such a large drive they will be compounded. Is my 232.88 GB
correct? and how do I do that math?


232.885591685771942138671875 GB is the actual number. WD refers to MB as 1,000,000 bytes and
states the formatted capacity of this specific hard drive as 250,059 MB.
Another words multiply 250,059 times a million, or 250,059,000,000 gives the capacity in bits.
Divide this by 1024, 3 times, gives you the term in actual GBs used by the PC.

2) What about the 'allocation unit size' (If I remember correctly this is the same as the
'cluster' size, correct me if I'm wrong please) when formating a partition on the drive? I have
always left this at the default value for NTFS partitions. Now that I'm dealing with such a
large drive does this setting become more important? how significant is it? what should I set it
to?

Yep, cluster size. If partitioning with XP's disk manager or XP install setup CD, just leave it
alone when done. It will format it automatically.

If you want a smaller cluster size, make a more suitable size partition for XP for both the same
identical partition for boot and system. Mine is 26GB as an example. Use the remainder of the
space for another partition that may use predominantly large files of your own device.
--
Jonny





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