partitioning large drives to lose less space

[scottatwittenberg]

i heard that with a large drive, making it one partition will cause it to lose more space than making it smaller partitions.. not necessarly as far as the size goes.. but when you have say a 732mb directory, and it takes up 800mb on the disk.. something about the sectors being larger...

is there any validity to this? or not really?

 

[feigned]

i heard that with a large drive, making it one partition will cause it to lose more space than making it smaller partitions.. not necessarly as far as the size goes.. but when you have say a 732mb directory, and it takes up 800mb on the disk.. something about the sectors being larger...

is there any validity to this? or not really?

It's negligible unless you have nothing but teensy little text files that fill up your new 200GB+ disk. Then again, with the cluster size on XP and 2k being 4k (on 2GB+ partitions) by default you're not losing much in the way of space to begin with. This used to be a problem for FAT32 users (and still can be).

It's clusters, not sectors that you're referring to. Every file on your hard drive is chunked up into a cluster or multiple clusters depending on how large it is. What you're asking about is when a 3KB text file is saved on disk in an environment where the cluster size is 4k, you lost 1KB of usable disk space. A 5KB file will take up two cluster and you will lose 3KB of usable space. If your cluster size were 64k and you had a 3KB file, it would use 3KB but you would lose 61KB of usable space. For a 65KB file you'd use two clusters and lose 63KB of usable space becuase no two files can occupy the same cluster.

Unless you're tweaking things for a database or are overly anal retentive, your home usage of cluster size is something that you shouldn't lose sleep over. Ideally you want to make it as small as possible, but if you have nothing but MP3's and .avi's on a partition you'd be fine with a larger cluster size. For all intents and purposes though...leave it alone.

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/...Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prkc_fil_lxty.asp
http://www.spadixbd.com/dsm/hs_wasted_space.htm