Topic: Idea On How To Format Large Hard Drive With 64k Clusters (Read 334 times)

MysticalMagnet · « **on:** March 02, 2008, 10:37:00 AM »

the xbox and pc use different formats when doing hard drives so when you would format it on pc and then put it in the xbox the xbox wont be able to read it

AliasCT · « **Reply #1 on:** March 02, 2008, 11:07:00 AM »

Yeah, the Xbox uses Fatx formatting instead of window's normal Fat32/16/NTFS

jimbobjim · « **Reply #2 on:** March 02, 2008, 12:37:00 PM »

Yeah that really wont work. It would be great though if somone updated xbpartitioner to format with 64k clusters. I want a 1tb hdd myself and would much prefer one big F partition.

If anyone out there has the skills to do this, please do so. I know many folks would appreciate it.

evilsanta666 · « **Reply #3 on:** March 02, 2008, 02:14:00 PM »

ok i have access to that program (it is version 9.0)

i am going to see if i can figure it out.

if anyone has done it then just post any results

i know there was some discussion on this somewhere so i will try and find it

-evilsanta-

jimbobjim · « **Reply #4 on:** March 05, 2008, 02:56:00 AM »

updates?

evilsanta666 · « **Reply #5 on:** March 05, 2008, 04:11:00 AM »

ok i took a look at the program Paragon Partition Manager version 9 (the one in the link is 5.5 but i could not get access to that version).

there is a way to set up partitions manually with this program. i did some quick reading on the difference with FAT and FATx partitions. with a little more research i might be able to get a working FATx partition using 64k clusters.

i will keep posting whenever i find out something new.

-evilsanta-

Bomb Bloke · « **Reply #6 on:** March 05, 2008, 06:22:00 AM »

Note that having one big partition isn't all roses... You stand to waste a LOT of space by partitioning a whole 1tb with 64kb clusters. Potentially tens to hundreds of gigabytes more then using 32kb clusters already wastes. It's a big price to pay just so you can have everything under one drive letter.

Check out this old article concerning slack space. Although it doesn't talk about FATX specifically it's relevant to all file systems that use a one-file-per-cluster rule.

As a general rule of thumb, you stand to waste less space the larger your files are. So if you wish to fill your drive with movies things won't be as bad as if you filled it with games (which tend to be made up of multiple smaller files).

But if you want to store lots of movies why not stick the drive in your PC, format it with NTFS (which defaults to a 4kb cluster size) and then stream everything from there?

Bomb Bloke · « **Reply #7 on:** March 05, 2008, 05:17:00 PM »

Sorry... You're off base.

You can only store one file in any given cluster (though multiple clusters can hold parts of the same file). Say you have a single byte file, using a 64kb cluster size it'll still take 64kb.

Now say you have a 65kb file. That's too big for a single cluster, so now you need two. Your file takes 128kb worth of drive space instead.

And a 129kb file takes 192kb (three clusters)...

And a 193kb file takes 256kb (four clusters)...

And so on and so forth.

Note that you can never waste more then 64kb per file, so the larger your files are the better efficiency you'll get. Basically space wasted = cluster size times the amount of files on the drive, so small clusters and large files are best.

On your PC, right click a large folder (such as Program Files) and select Properties from the context menu. Give the system a little time to calculate it's size. You'll notice there's two listings: "Size" and "Size on disk".

The former is how much space the files and folders take up. The later is how much space is actually used, due to cluster slack. Typically the later value will be higher (though Windows compression can sometimes reverse this).

Now consider how many files you could get onto a 1tb partition, and how a cluster size sixteen times what NTFS can use would affect the wastage.

Movax · « **Reply #8 on:** March 05, 2008, 05:23:00 PM »

QUOTE(wildonrio @ Mar 5 2008, 12:51 PM)

The only time you'll waste space with a hhd with 64k clusters is for every file that is less than 64k.

No. Besides what you said, as soon as a file is over 64k, just one byte, it uses another 64k, and so on. So unless every file is divisible by 64k, you're wasting space. Things like mp3s, Roms, waste quite a bit.

Bomb bloke beat me to it... oh well.

lordvader129 · « **Reply #9 on:** March 05, 2008, 05:25:00 PM »

QUOTE(Bomb Bloke @ Mar 5 2008, 04:53 PM)

Sorry... You're off base.

You can only store one file in any given cluster (though multiple clusters can hold parts of the same file). Say you have a single byte file, using a 64kb cluster size it'll still take 64kb.

Now say you have a 65kb file. That's too big for a single cluster, so now you need two. Your file takes 128kb worth of drive space instead.

And a 129kb file takes 192kb (three clusters)...

And a 193kb file takes 256kb (four clusters)...

And so on and so forth.

Note that you can never waste more then 64kb per file, so the larger your files are the better efficiency you'll get. Basically space wasted = cluster size times the amount of files on the drive, so small clusters and large files are best.

On your PC, right click a large folder (such as Program Files) and select Properties from the context menu. Give the system a little time to calculate it's size. You'll notice there's two listings: "Size" and "Size on disk".

The former is how much space the files and folders take up. The later is how much space is actually used, due to cluster slack. Typically the later value will be higher (though Windows compression can sometimes reverse this).

Now consider how many files you could get onto a 1tb partition, and how a cluster size sixteen times what NTFS can use would affect the wastage.

but it also depends on how many files you are storing, if you are storing emulator romsets and have tens of thousands of files then it can be a huge problem, if you are storing a few hundred HD movies its less of a problem, or a few dozen full dvd isos its hardly a problem at all

jimbobjim · « **Reply #10 on:** March 06, 2008, 02:36:00 AM »

I still can't see it being much of a problem, it would take literally thousands of files just to waste one gb.

Bomb Bloke · « **Reply #11 on:** March 06, 2008, 03:50:00 AM »

I have pointed (multiple times) that this isn't such an issue with larger files. But think how many small files can go into 1tb.

If the issue doesn't matter to you, then by all means use a larger cluster size. I'm just pointing out that there's a double edge.

lordvader129 · « **Reply #12 on:** March 06, 2008, 06:27:00 PM »

QUOTE(wildonrio @ Mar 6 2008, 12:38 PM)

Well this isn't an issue for anyone really since we can't figure out 64k clusters in FATx. Still waiting on someone to check out that windows program Paragon Partition Manager that supposedly can format a hdd in FATx with 64k clusters. If anyone else can get a hold of that program and see if it does it, we'll be well on our way to using 750gb hard drives and bigger without having to split F and G.

if someone has a bit of programming knowledge they change xbpartitioner to support 64k clusters, i recall the dev (nightshd i think?) saying it should be fairly easy to implement in the future

Movax · « **Reply #13 on:** March 07, 2008, 10:55:00 AM »

Source code is out there. Not sure if it's on xbins.

lordvader129 · « **Reply #14 on:** March 07, 2008, 08:30:00 PM »

QUOTE(Movax @ Mar 7 2008, 10:31 AM)

Source code is out there. Not sure if it's on xbins.

yeah, its open source, and the source is on xbins (and right here)

http://xbehome.com/x...ionerSource.rar

Author Topic: Idea On How To Format Large Hard Drive With 64k Clusters (Read 334 times)