how to calculate correctly the cluster size

[Josiah Carlson]

> Josiah> The Windows 2k "Disk Administrator" software for 
> Josiah> 2K always uses 4k cluster sizes by default.  
> Josiah> I believe your varied cluster sizes are the 
> Josiah> result of using Partition Magic to create them.
> 
> FWIW, the FORMAT command does offer the possibility of selecting
> different cluster sizes. I've never used it personally (and I'm
> not about to try it on this machine, either!)

Indeed, you can change the cluster sizes using the command-line format 
command.  However, when formatting a fresh drive using the format 
command at the command line, I would expect that it would do the same 
thing as the Disk Administrator, user cluster sizes of 4k if possible. 
For a FAT 32 drive, that range is 256 megabytes ... 8 terabytes.

Why 4k?  I don't know, maybe it strikes a nice balance between not 
having enough and having too many clusters, or maybe it is to mirror the 
4k/page size of many paging schemes in modern operating systems.  A 
filesystem designer would probably be quite helpful at this moment.

  - Josiah