For Tumbleweed...

[RonK]

Just found some info that might help. I'm going to try it myself on one of
my other partitions.

» In WinNT and beyond it is possible to specify what file-system to use and
the cluster-size parameter has changed to name (A)llocation-size. The
cluster-size value to use must be one of the supported values given above.

FORMAT <drive>: /FS:<NTFS/FAT/FAT32> /A:<cluster-size>

Select only NTFS , FAT or FAT32

 

[Alon Brodski]

Hey!

As why I need 64K clusters....reason is simple....I don't care to lose
couple of hundreds of MB of HD space.I have 6 GB HD and it's more than
enough.I write on CR-Rs extra data that won't fit in HD
But I have an old PIII 450 MHz Dell computer with 192 MB of SDRAM. And Win
98 SE worked fine on it ,but Win XP Pro is kinda slow.So I'm considering to
add more RAM AND also by making clusters bigger I want to improve system's
overall performance.Since when I have like 300 MB of a swapfile and when you
HEAR almost constantly access to HD (which is not SCSI or superfast
EIDE,only ATA-4),and when you load from HD huge video files (like 100 MB a
piece) plus the fact that an average file's size is like over 200K....In
short....HD is a SLOW mechanical device ,vs.CPU and RAM.Therefore....less
time you have to wait for it's heads to move around looking for those small
4K clusters all over it,faster PC would work.And when you constantly
deleting and downloading from the Web huge video files,HD becomes fragmented
faster and it takes pretty long to run Defrag all the time.
Well,may be if I had the money to buy P4 3.2 GHz CPU and like 1 GB of DDR
RAM,it would be even better,but formatting is FREE!

To be honest....I didn't invent the wheel...I read about that
somewhere.Plus...it's just common sense
I was suprised that noone asked for it and I couldn't find an answer
ANYWHERE!
You just read everywhere about those default 4K clusters that Windows
automatically create.
And about that command line format switch "a " option that God knows how
can be implemented in a real life.

Truly yours,
Alon.
P.S.One guy advised me to use Recovery Console,but I had a fiasco,'cos
format command there doesn't have "a" switch.

 

[Tumbleweed]

Hey!

As why I need 64K clusters....reason is simple....I don't care to lose
couple of hundreds of MB of HD space.I have 6 GB HD and it's more than
enough.I write on CR-Rs extra data that won't fit in HD
But I have an old PIII 450 MHz Dell computer with 192 MB of SDRAM. And Win
98 SE worked fine on it ,but Win XP Pro is kinda slow.So I'm considering to
add more RAM AND also by making clusters bigger I want to improve system's
overall performance.Since when I have like 300 MB of a swapfile and when you
HEAR almost constantly access to HD (which is not SCSI or superfast
EIDE,only ATA-4),and when you load from HD huge video files (like 100 MB a
piece) plus the fact that an average file's size is like over 200K....In
short....HD is a SLOW mechanical device ,vs.CPU and RAM.Therefore....less
time you have to wait for it's heads to move around looking for those small
4K clusters all over it,faster PC would work.And when you constantly
deleting and downloading from the Web huge video files,HD becomes fragmented
faster and it takes pretty long to run Defrag all the time.
Well,may be if I had the money to buy P4 3.2 GHz CPU and like 1 GB of DDR
RAM,it would be even better,but formatting is FREE!

To be honest....I didn't invent the wheel...I read about that
somewhere.Plus...it's just common sense
I was suprised that noone asked for it and I couldn't find an answer
ANYWHERE!
You just read everywhere about those default 4K clusters that Windows
automatically create.
And about that command line format switch "a " option that God knows how
can be implemented in a real life.

Truly yours,
Alon.
P.S.One guy advised me to use Recovery Console,but I had a fiasco,'cos
format command there doesn't have "a" switch.

Contradictions here...'I have 6GB and its enough' vs 'i dont care to lose
hundreds of Mb of disk' vs 'I want bigger clusters' ......if you have bigger
clusters, you'll waste *more* disk space!!

If you have partition magic you can resize partitions (not sure if you can
resize on the fly, I would guess you can from a rescue disk, it appears that
it will let me on the fly but I sure am not going to try!) On the other
hand, you could buy another disk for the price of partition magic. Maybe
you'd be better off with a faster disk/ an extra disk (to minimise the disk
swapping between system files and data files). BTW, with partition magic you
can see how much wasted space there would be at different partition sizes.
I've just tried it on my C drive. At 4k (what it is) there is 107Mb wasted.
At 64k, it would be 1.7GB wasted! Thats on a 30GB Disk (partition) with 8GB
used.

That constant disk access you hear is likely due to swapping because you
dont have enough memory, and because all your files (apps, swap, data) are
on the same physical disk. Seems likely to me that altering cluster size
would make little or no difference to performance until you fix RAM and disk
speed and number of disks first. You are like someone who had a leg broken
and is trying different trainers on to run faster. Fix the leg (RAM and disk
spindles) first, *then* the trainers.

Or you could go back to Win98, your system is right on the edge of what is
acceptable for XP.

Bottom line, get more memory &another faster disk; and changing cluster size
is not going to be the magic performance wand you seem to think it will be
but it will sure lose you more disk space which will make fragmentation
worse.