CompuServe Messages

>>big disks and big partitions… Robin, A couple of comments on DOS partitions… Although you can make a disk one large partition, you may want to make smaller partitions for several reasons. I'm certainly no hardware wizard but from a few personal observations: – Large partitions are slower for directory access and directory tree building (as in Windows and NCD, etc.) – Large partitions require large cluster sizes. Since there are only 65536 entries in the FAT table, the cluster size must go up as the partion size increases. For example, 65 to 128-meg -> 4 sectors/cluster -> 2K bytes per cluster 129 to 256-meg -> 8 sectors/cluster -> 4K bytes per cluster 257 to 512-meg -> 16 sectors/cluster -> 8K bytes per cluster etc. My last machine came with a 540-meg drive which I didn't take the time to re-partition, so each cluster is 32 sectors. A file must occupy an integer number of clusters, so a 1-byte file will take up 16K of space on the disk! Not really a problem for big image files, but a real space waster where there are hundreds of small files. – In the event of a crash, a whole partition is likely to go. For example, I had one drive partitioned into four 128-meg partitions (C,D,E & F). The drive crashed (it's a paperweight now) but D, E, and F were still perfectly readable. I lost everything on drive C since my last backup. Also, as someone recently pointed out on this forum, the drive/partition that gets the most use is the one most likely to crash. For this reason, many people make a small partition (32 megs or so) as a bootable drive C and use it for all of their operating system, Windows stuff, etc. I like to use partitions to organize my computers: one partition for system stuff, one for C-compilers, one for graphics software, one for work project data, one for personal stuff, a (big) one for rendered images, etc. Makes for a lot of disk drive letters, however, especially when networked. And yes, Frodo lives. J K J