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I had purchased a 1TB hard disk for my system. I already have a 250GB hard disk 3 partitions in it. Now I want to know which is best cluster size of 1TB hard drive. How can properly install this hard disk and assign a cluster size to the disc. How can I view the cluster size for my old drive. Does I will need a third party tool for doing the same. Thanks.
Here small cluster means a big index area but less space. This means that a less amount of space is wasted and in the same way big cluster means a less index area but large amount of space at the end. You can determine that what cluster size is assign to your old hard drive by command prompt. Launch cmd give the command chkdsk and press enter. The bytes in each of a allocation unit is a cluster size. To obtain them just divide them by 1024.
To install your hard drive properly click on Start Menu > Control Panel. Open Administrative Tools and then click on Computer Management. At below you will see Disk Management. Right click on it and select format. Select the relevant format type and format then. You can even create partition here or merge it with other hard disk.
I will list you some information by which you can determine that how Windows assign a cluster size to the hard drive. This is for Windows NT/2000/XP. For a Drive of 512 Mb or less the cluster size is 512 bytes utilizing a single sector, for 513 to 1024 Mb the cluster size goes to 1024 bytes i.e 1 KB utilizing 2 sectors, for 1025 to 2048 mb i.e . 2KB the size goes to 2048 bytes utilizing 4 sectors. And above that it takes up 4096 bytes with 8 sectors.