John and other subscribers

Can you recommend a good source of information regarding HD formatting
(FAT16 vs FAT32). Also is it possible to set the cluster size on a FAT16
dirve to 32k?

Regards

David George
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>>> [log in to unmask] 24/July/2000 06:56pm >>>
At 12:53 AM 07/24/2000 Edna Sloan wrote:
>
>. . . .  I am running W98 on a 10G drive. . . Also with
>the 32k clusters it should run faster than the 4k of FAT32. . .
>
Edna:

You should set aside an entire drive volume for your swap file....The
reason to use FAT16, is that you probably never need a swap file larger
than 512MB (in its own drive volume, of course; 512MB is the smallest
standard FAT32 volume size). More importantly, FAT16 is faster than
FAT32. It's not the size of the clusters (since a memory page is still
4KB) but the fact that file allocation tables are implemented as linked
lists, and there are many more (smaller) clusters to keep track of in
FAT32. A FAT16 swap file on a 128MB to 255MB drive volume will have 4KB
clusters, the same as FAT32, but with less overhead.

Regards,

John Chin

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