UPGRADING REPAIRING PCs

Benefits of Hard Disk Partitioning 127
(makers of the popular PartitionMagic disk utility), and I’ve
followed their advice for some time. Some time ago, I lost
both C: and D: drives to a completely unexpected disk crash,
but my data, on E:, stayed safe!
• For FAT-16 operating systems in particular (MS-DOS,
Windows 95/95a, and others using FAT-16), partitioning
the drive results in significantly less disk
space wasted—Because files are actually stored in clusters
(or allocation units) that are multiples of the 512-byte disk
sector, a small file must occupy an entire cluster. As Table
4.20 indicates, the bigger the drive, the greater the space
wasted.
Table 4.20 FAT-16 Cluster Sizes
Drive Size
Drive Size (Defined by Cluster
(Defined by FDISK) Drive Maker) Size in Cluster Size
Binary MB/GB Decimal MB/GB Binary KB in Bytes
0–127MB1 0–133MB1 2KB 2,048
128–255MB 134–267MB 4KB 4,096
256–511MB 268–537MB 8KB 8,192
512MB–1023MB
1024MB (1GB)–
538MB–1073MB 16KB 16,384
2048MB (2GB) 1074MB–2113MB 32KB 32,768
1. If you create a partition under 15MB (binary) in size, the operating system actually uses the
old FAT-12 file system, which results in a cluster size of 8KB!
FAT-32 Versus FAT-16 Cluster Sizes
FAT-32 is far more efficient than FAT-16 and is used by virtually
every recent system with a pre-installed copy of Windows 95 OSR
2.x (95B/95C),Windows 98, or Windows Me. If you are installing
an additional hard disk on a system that uses these operating systems,
use Table 4.21 to determine the relative efficiencies of FAT-16
versus FAT-32 because you can choose either FAT type for the entire
new drive or any partitions on it. This chart uses binary
(FDISK/BIOS) sizes only.
Table 4.21 FAT-16 Versus FAT-32
Cluster Size FAT-16 Partition Size FAT-32 Partition Size
4KB 128MB—255MB 260MB—8GB
8KB 256MB—511MB 8GB—16GB
16KB 512MB—1024MB 16GB—32GB
32KB 1025MB—2048MB 32GB—2TB