Partition Type and Drive Size

[jkukowsk]

I remember sitting in a talk about two years ago on how the size of a drive partitioned with FAT32 dictated how big a file trully came to be stored on the hard drive - The bigger a partition the bigger a file. Does anyone know if this same principle holds true for NTFS or any of the Linux partitions (ext2 , ext3)?

 

[Nothinman]

You're talking about cluster size and FAT has to make the clusters bigger as the drive gets bigger because it wasn't designed for big drives and it has a low ceiling with regards to how many clusters it can assign, so as the drives get too big all that can be done is to make the clusters bigger to cover the available space. NTFS, ext2, XFS, etc were all designed with large filesystems in mind and as such don't suffer from those problems. 9 times out of 10 you'll have 4K clusters, even on a filesystem that would have 32K clusters with a 32-bit FAT.