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Selecting a Drive Partition Size



Selecting a Drive Partition Size

Base the partition size on how the computer will be used.


FDISK assigns space on a hard disk drive in clusters. A cluster, or allocation unit, is the smallest unit of space on the drive that your operating system can address using FAT conventions. The operating system assigns one or more clusters to each file. Even a very small file uses one cluster. The following table shows how the cluster size is incremented as the partition size increases.

Partition Size Cluster Size (FAT)
0 MB - 16 MB 4 KB
16 MB - 128 MB 2 KB
128 MB - 256 MB 4 KB
256 MB - 512 MB 8 KB
512 MB - 1 GB 16 KB
1 GB - 2 GB 32 KB


These examples illustrate the effect of cluster size on hard disk space allocation.



If you replace a hard disk drive with a much larger capacity drive, normally you will create a larger partition size on the new drive. When you copy files from a smaller partition to a larger partition, the same files require surprisingly more space on the disk because of the increased cluster size.


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