Thread: Cluster size?
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Old 03-17-2006, 11:35 AM
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clusters for all reasonable purposes do not affect the overall performance that much. Larger clusters do allow for a slight increase in read time and causes less fragmentation, but depding on the size of files you could be wasting quite a bit of space. In short the cluster size defines the smallest piece of your hard drive that a file is allowed to use.

Example:
saving a 7KB file.
*cluster size will be a multiple of two (2^#)
cluster size of 4KB -> you need 2 clusters wasting 1KB
cluster size of 32KB -> you need 2 cluster,but you just wasted 25KB

*If your files are likely to expand, say programming files on an on going large project a larger cluster size for that partition may be better, or if one segment hold larger files on average. Other than that, the default is a default for a reason. There have been tests done showing that the default cluster size is appropriate for most cases.



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