A 45GB harddrive with a cluster size of 4KB??? possible and safe?

[lostatlantis]

hi,

I just bought a IBM 45GB deskstar drive (love it!) and in the process of setting it up, i noticed that the IBM disk software had an option of choosing a different cluster size for the drive other than the default 32KB, even when I chose the partition the entire drive as one partition! I was kinda scared and didn't mess with it, but man now I only have 3GB of data on there and the slack is over 180MB! Is there any harm in making a 45GB partition with cluster size smaller than 32KB?

 

[GoldenTiger]

Nope... my 30gb Maxtor is 4kb clusters and it's been running fine for a year and a half .

 

[lazyboy]

can you change it without losing data?

 

[PliotronX]

<< can you change it without losing data? >>



Yep, PartitionMagic can do it. Although performance degrades just to save a few hundred megs of space... not worth it IMO

 

[lostatlantis]

really? so safety isn't a concern? just speed?

 

[lostatlantis]

i have Partition Magic 6.0. Would that do it, or do I need the &quot;Pro&quot; version? where would i go, if it does allow me to do it? I just got the software with the HD and haven't gotten familiar with it yet.

so basically a smaller cluster size WON'T raise concern in term of data safety, just speed? you see at my rate of 180MB slack / 3GB, a full 45GB would mean 2.7GB of waster space!!

 

[sharkeeper]

On that size partition, the default cluster size is 32 KB. 4KB results in severely degraded performance especially when running scandisk and defrag programs. If slack is a concern, use NTFS! Of course, you'll need to be running Windows 2000 but shouldn't everyone by now?

Cheers!

 

[lostatlantis]

well actually i was thinking 16KB, 4KB is way too extreme even for me.

and you know what, I am thinking about going to Win2K. How exactly does NTFS tackle this slack problem? What would the benefit of switching over to the NT file system, besides security? I heard it's actually slower.

 

[heng1028]

newbie question:
the smaller the cluster size the better performance??

or it is just more capacity with smallet cluster size

 

[PliotronX]

Smaller clusters = more space, less performance

Larger clusters = less space, more performance


Of course, this does not apply to NTFS NTFS is much more advanced than FAT and FAT32. That's all I know.

 

[Lvsheng]

In my opinion, you shouldn't partition a 45GB drive as 1 partition. You see, for 45GB the seek time is higher bacause the read write head has larger area to cover. So instead of using one big partition, why not chop down to several small partition? So that the each read write head has smaller area to cover? (This is what my teacher taught me)

And if you go for 1 large partition, you tend to lose a lot of space. Because if a file is smaller than 32kb, it still must use the whole cluster, thus wasting space (like FAT16 already).

In FAT32

<260MB cluster: 512k
260mb-8gb cluster: 4kb
8gb-16gb cluster: 8kb
16gb-32gb cluster: 16kb
32gb-2048gb cluster: 32kb

So you can see if your partition used large cluster size, wastage can occur. Although you can set the cluster size to be smaller, but some program (scandisk) will not work or slow. Because the more cluster is available, thus using more mem, so Scandisk run in dos will be slower, and need more RAM. Last time I choose my cluster size to 2kb on a 4GB partition, the result? Scandisk run slow like hell in DOS.