Defragmenting Drives with Large Cluster Size

[ElSilva]

Multiple partitions

mikesong, if you want to use FAT32, just create multiple partitions. Sure, it may be a hassle if your software wants to write all its audio in one dir, and you have to change that when a partition starts to get full. Maybe you can just create a 32GB partition, and use the 8GB to store mixed down WAV files or something.

-ElSilva

 

[Havoc]

I use w2k ntfs 64k clusters and no, read above: standard defrag cannot go above 4k clusters. Maybe the full diskeeper can, but not tested.

The difference between ntfs and fat32 is indeed in the 90 vs 92 tracks range for the same disk. Tested this once with dskbench.

The /z:64 makes sense. One sector is 512 bytes, 64 of those is a 32k cluster.

 

[mikesong]

I had read your posts Havoc, but I wasn't sure if the 4k limit you referenced was for NTFS, FAT32, or both? So I take it the limit applies to NTFS, is that also true for FAT32 if I went the partitioning route? Do you know how much a performance hit I would take if I went down to 4k, given that I think that the hard disk is probably the bottleneck in my system - AMD 2000+ Athlon, 512MB Micron DDR, Asus A7m266 board, Maxtor 7200 RPM ATA-133 40GB. Unless it's a huge difference compared to larger clusters, I'd do just about anything to avoid having to backup and reformat my drive every week or so as fragmentation gets worse.

 

[Havoc]

Sorry, I do not use fat32. All my disks are ntfs except for the boot partition, and that is plain fat just like me .

To check for the differences between cluster sizes, go find the dskbench program, it should be somewhere on the prorec site. This gives you the number of tracks you would get on the partition for different cluster sizes.

You do not have to backup-format-restore! Just copy to a different disk and copy back defrags also IF there is space to put it in one chunck on the disk.