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Partitioning for speed?

R

rodan

Senior member
When thinking about partitioning a 40 gb harddrive, is there any speed, as well as space saving benefits.
For instance, when partitioning a 40gb hardddrive, into one partition, the cluster size is 32k, but, I can make roughly four or five partitions at 4k cluster size. Will the computer perform better, with the operating system on the 4k cluster partition, than, if I would partition it at a higher cluster size? And, do I really save that much space if I partition so that the cluster size is 4k vs 32k ?
 
A file must take up an entire cluster, so ifa file is 5K large it really takes up 8K on disk, wasting 3K, because it has to use 2 4K clusters. If you have 32K clusters that file will waste 27K.

If you're not using Win9X don't even consider FAT, go with NTFS and avoid a lot of things, including 32K clusters.
 
There is very little performance benefit from having smaller clusters. In fact, there may be a performance degradation since there will be more fragmentation.

However, if you have a large number of files, then you will have a lot of wasted space due to 32K clusters. 4-5 partitions might be excessive to keep track of (hmmm... did I save that file on G: or E:...), but 2-3 has some practical benefits like being able to save your data on one partition while reformatting your OS on another.
 
I'm using Windows 98 SE, so, I guess I cannot format with NTFS, but, here is another question: what are the "dividing lines" between a switch in cluster size? What I mean is, I know if I partition at 8gb, the cluster sizes will be 4k, but, if I partition over 8gb, the cluster size will be 8k, but, till what gb size? What is the largest gb I can partition to keep the cluster size at 8k? What about 16k?
 
I used to parition like mad but it annoyed me having so many drives, I still have 6 but for a reason, it helps me to split up my usage of the hard drive into Images, Vids etc.

I don't think partitioning gives you much of a performence boost but it does save space especially on FAT/FAT32.

You may wanna split that drive in approx 3 partitions maybe or keep it as one depending on whether you want drives for specific files.

Corm
 
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