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[courtesy of Zubair Ahmad, a MCT/MCSE from Aris Corp]
The following tables illustrate below the various cluster size limitations for each particular file systems. Why should you care about the cluster size of your partition? Because you can save a great deal of space by choosing the right file system. For example, if your file is 1K in size and your cluster size is 32K, then you've just wasted 31K of "slack" space for that file.
FAT/FAT16 (DOS/Windows 95/Windows NT)
FAT32 (Windows 95 version 950B or 950C/Windows 98)
NTFS (Windows NT)
Note: FAT16 is limited to 2GB per partition.Partition Size Cluster Size 0 - 127MB 2K 128 - 255MB 4K 256 - 511MB 8K 512 - 1023MB 16K 1024 - 2047MB 32K
Note: A partition formatted as FAT32 can only been seen in
Windows 95 version 950B/950C or Windows 98. Eariler versions of Windows 95, DOS 6.22, or even Windows NT 4.0 cannot recognize FAT32 partitions!Partition Size Cluster Size 512MB or less 4K 8GB - 16GBB 8K 16GB - 32GB 16K 32GB or more 32K
Note: You cannot use NTFS file compression if your cluster size is larger than 4K.Partition Size Sectors/Cluster Cluster Size 512MB or less 1 512 bytes 513MB - 1024MB (1GB) 2 1K 1025MB - 2048MB (2GB) 4 2K 2049MB - 4096MB (4GB) 8 4K 4097MB - 8192MB (8GB) 16 8K 8193MB - 16,384MB (16GB) 32 16K 16,385MB - 32,768MB (32GB) 64 32K 32GB or more 128 64K