Allocation table, new IBM and FAT32

[Deanodarlo]

I've just recently bough an IBM/Hitachi 120GB 180GXP 8MB cache and this drive absolutely rocks! Sequential we're talking about 60MB read, 55MB write and 7ms access on HDtach! I'm just hoping that IBM are producing drives out of "deathstar" mode, but the 120GXP seems ok so I was willing to bet that these drives have overcome any weaknesses - they run really cool as well, much cooler than the infamous 75GXP. And this thing is QUIET - the quietest hard drive I've EVER owned and I only have low speed 2000RPM fans masking it's sound. Man those seagates must be in Blue thunder whisper mode if they're quieter than this.

I can't believe how cheap technology is these days! Grabbed all this storage for like 79 squids.

Being a hardened Win ME user, I've just realised it hasn't exactly got the best File system for large drives - that honour goes to XP with NTFS and 4K clusters.

Now, I've set-up my partitions as follows:

120GB IDE 1 master
-------------------------

System: 8,191GB (max allowed for 4K cluster size.)

Games: 8,191GB

Storage: approx 100GB, 16K cluster size.


20GB IDE 1 slave
----------------------

Transfer: approx 3GB - used for files coming into or going out (CDRW) of the system.

BackUP: approx 12GB - all my important files backed up here on shutdown. Only backs up those that have changed, takes seconds using the freeware utility Taskzip. Also contains a ghost image of the system partition.


Now it's my understanding for FAT32 partitions over 32GB should use 32K cluster sizes in order to keep the file system size reasonable. Using partition manager, I've managed to get 16KB clusters to reduce slack, but the file allocation table needed to handle this is huge - like 25MB!!!

I'm assuming the computer has to access this every time it wants to write to the disk, so will I take a performance hit from having such a large file s? Or doesn't it matter as long as you have enough memory to hold it in the windows disk cache for fast access?

Yes I'm really bored at the moment, which is why I just wrote all this drivel out. 😛

 

[MithShrike]

Umm... OK.

 

[Deanodarlo]

There was a question among all that drivel:

I'm assuming the computer has to access this every time it wants to write to the disk, so will I take a performance hit from having such a large file allocation table? Or doesn't it matter as long as you have enough memory to hold it in the windows disk cache for fast access?

The rest of it was just to alleviate boredom. 😛

 

[kursplat]

is Andy back from vacation yet ? Deanodarlo needs to get FAQ'ed.
i'm just trying to figure out the "Being a hardened Win ME user" part...

 

[Deanodarlo]

Thanks for the link, but it doesn't address my question, just provides all the info I've already read on the net. In the FAQ's it states:

You cannot decrease the cluster size on a volume using the FAT32 file system so that the FAT ends up larger than 16 MB less 64 KB in size.

Now, contradicting this statement, I've clearly made a 100GB partition that has a FAT of over 25MB in size with 16K clusters! Although Microsoft's FDISK wouldn't allow this, partition manager did. FDISK would have created a 100GB partition with 32K clusters and a FAT of 12MB keeping with the FAQ statement.

My question is will this cause a degradation in performance as the FAT will need continual access or will the FAT be held in windows vcache and simply cause more memory to be used up?

And you'd be surprised how well Windows ME can be setup. Unless you're running a server or need 24/7 uptime, it's an absolutely fine OS. Contradictory to popular belief, it's very stable on my machine - just requires a bit of tweaking and that awful system restore removing in favour of using ghost. Also, it's drivers are very mature, everything runs faster and I don't have a machine with 2GHz processor and 512MB RAM. Win XP still has a few things to iron out in my mind before I go around completely updating my software collection to get the same job done which can be time consuming and very expensive. I'll probably wait and jump straight to a 64bit OS and hardware setup.

 

[kursplat]

The maximum possible number of clusters on a volume using the FAT32 file system is 268,435,445. With a maximum of 32 KB per cluster with space for the file allocation table (FAT), this equates to a maximum disk size of approximately 8 terabytes (TB).

this is from both the FAQ's , and the MS knowlagebase here.

I've clearly made a 100GB partition that has a FAT of over 25MB in size with 16K clusters!

i didn't read it as you couldn't do it. fat 32 looks to support 8 TERABYTES .
you can try HDTach and see if it's sloooww

 

[Deanodarlo]

Thanks for the pointers. 🙂