New
#1
Question about format cluster size
G'day,
I've been experimenting with EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition and a spare 500GB WD 5000AAKS external USB disk as part of my self education. Specifically, I've been experimenting with cluster sizes after reading this in the EASEUS help file:
EaseUS Partition Master Manual - Formatting Partitions with partition manager software, unformat hard drive with format recovery software.
Perhaps I misunderstood, but does this imply that using a larger cluster size will cause the disk to be accessed faster?The smaller cluster size is, the bigger file allocation table (FAT) will be. The bigger the FAT is, the slower the operation system works with the disk.
To test this, I formatted the WD as NTFS using a 512 byte cluster size and then timed a copy of 3.1GB from my internal HDD to the WD USB drive. I repeated the exercise after formatting a second time using a 64KB cluster size.
These are the results:
512 byte cluster size : time for copy = 5min 50sec
64KB cluster size : time for copy = 6min 41sec
The result seems counter-intuitive given my understanding of the line from the help file. Have I misunderstood? What is the benefit of formatting using different cluster sizes? Why is there options to format using different cluster sizes?
Thanks,
Golden