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Date: | Sat, 20 Nov 1999 03:50:10 -0800 |
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On 17 Nov 99, at 10:28, mjd wrote:
> I have read the facts on partitioning a hard drive, how to, etc.
> Could someone tell me why and when you would want to do this?
There are three key factors:
1. Various disk formats may have a maximum volume/partition size.
For instance, using DOS (since about version 3.3) or Win 9x, FAT16
partitions cannot exceed 2GB in size.
2. Oartition size can affect the efficiency of a format. For
instance, the larger you make a FAT16 partition, the larger its
"clusters" (also called "allocation units") have to be. Each file
consists of a whole number of allocation units; on average, the last
one is only half used. So there is an estimated half a cluster of
wasted drive capacity per file. The bigger your clusters, the more
wasted space. [This was a much more important issues when common
drives were less than about 500 MB....]
3. If you want to run multiple OSes on a single machine, they may
prefer different boot volume formats.
If you are running a single modern OS on up-to-date hardware, you
may be able to ignore partitioning issues.
David G
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