Cluster size help.

[rolisme]

Anyone know what the advaantages/disadvantages of having small cluster size on your hard drive are versuses larger ones? This confuses me as I cannot see why anyone would want big ones. Who wants a 3k text file taking up 32k of space when it can only take up 4k. Why does Windows XP give you the option to change it? Makes no sense to me.
Thanks in advance for any advice.

[Shane R. Monroe]

Its all a trade off of speed versus efficiency.

If you have a 1MB file begin read, and its made up of thousands of 4k chunks, then the hard drive head could technically COULD significantly move thousands of times to read that file. If you are fragmented, it could really beat up your drive (and take longer) than if it were accessing that file 8x less.

So its really speed and drive wear and tear. If a drive is full of nothing but large files, you may REALLY consider using 32k clusters. The OS drive, however, I would always use 4k clusters on. Others may have a different view, but that's my stand on it.