Format FAT32 with 32k Clusters

This is useful to speed up smaller drives.  The recent slew of monster drives make the 32k cluster size a default, since anything smaller than that makes too many clusters, and older systems cannot address huge numbers of clusters in their the FAT table.

By default, the format command will use the smallest cluster sizes possible for your hard drive partition.  It does this to maximize the usage of the available space.  If you use large cluster sizes, then small files will be forced to use at least one cluster, which wastes space.  However it wastes a small amount of space, and with todays huge drives - this is no longer an issue.

What is an issue is how fast your system can read and write files from the hard drive.  The larger the cluster size - the larger "chunks" that are fetched from the drive.  This speeds up performance.  For example, many drives were formatted with 4k clusters.  This means to read 32k of data, the system must perform eight fetches -  4k per fetch.  If you had instead formatted the same drive using 32k clusters, the system would only have to perform one fetch.

The format command is done in DOS, and the syntax is as follows :

format x: /z:64
    where x= your hard drive letter will format 32k clusters under fat 32.


for other sizes of clusters :

FORMAT x: /Z:n     - where n is the number of 512 byte sectors in a cluster;
    NOTE:  n must be a number 2^x, so: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, ...

Examples:

format c: /z:32 (for 32 - 512 byte sectors per cluster = 16 bytes per cluster)
format c: /z:16 (for 16 - 512 byte sectors per cluster = 8k bytes per cluster)
etc.

NOTE: if you do not specify with the /z switch, it will default to 4 kB per cluster if possible (unless the drive is too big, then it may have to use larger cluster sizes). The minimum size of the drive partition for the default 4 kB clusters is 504 MB. This minimum size changes if you use larger cluster sizes, as does the maximum size.