Hi there,
There is a comparison chart somewhere on Microsoft that illustrates what I
will try to explain clearly in as few words as possible..
)
If the average size of you files was slightly less than 4KB then the cluster
size would need to be 4KB. If your average file size is in MegaBytes AND you
had 4KB clusters and remembering that each cluster has a "From" field at its
beginning and a "To" field at the end then you would need a huge amount of
clusters just to store this one file. Because of the extra data in the
clusters each cluster actually holds less than 4KB of your file...and that's
why you often see that the file occupies X KB + Y KB when the file is
actually only X KB. The file seems bigger than it really is.
And the opposite occurs if your average file size is quite small but your
cluster size is set to 64KB...imagine a 1KB file sitting in a cluster of
64KB. a cluster will only ever hold one file or one part of a file...so a
few small files take up a LARGE amount of disk space.
My C Drive is set at 16KB I think and my D and E drives are both set at
64KB...because they both hold very large files.
With real time (or as near as possible real time) writing to a hard drive
where the file size is going to be large then cluster sizes of 64KB are
preferable. There is less management of the data that keeps track of where
the next cluster is and so on leaving more time for the actual "write to
disk"
I hope this helps a little.
--
Best Wishes.....John Kelly
www.the-kellys.org
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