Ahh, summer is here and for some of us this means a slowdown. Time to perhaps to do some "house keeping" and perhaps some optimizing and updating. Every one should do some regular maintenance to the "studio computer" to ensure continued reliability and flawless operation. This month we will look at some basic information about your recording medium, the Hard Drive Partition. I have tried to make this understandable by everyone regardless of computer savvy.

Disk Partitions

Cluster and Cluster size

Creating a Partition

Disk Fragmentation

Tips and Tricks

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Disk Partitions

Introduction

Computer technology has provided us with more speed, more power and more space. Often the analogy of files in a filing cabinet is used to visualize how your computer stores files on your hard drive. Today's hard drives have a much larger capacity than previously. Often when you "get your new computer" the system drive is set up as one large partition. Everything you do happens on, and to, this drive. The larger the capacity the more data, or files it will hold. Today, a large capacity drive of 9 gigabytes can also waste a great deal of space and make it increasingly more difficult to keep your files organized. The surface area that your drive heads have to search for requested files is tremendous and really does slow down access and transfer rates. Remember the file cabinet analogy? Think of your single C:\ partition as the drawer of your virtual file cabinet. At 500 meg, the drawer pulls out about 5 feet, and at one gig it extends another 5 feet. The more surface area the heads have to search, the longer it takes to find and read requested files. You get the picture.

Dos and Windows have made it easier to store and retrieve greater numbers of folders and files by letting you sub-divide you hard drive into additional partitions. This is like adding another drawer to your file cabinet. This is a logical way of utilizing the space you have more efficiently. Three things happen when you use multiple partitions on a single physical drive:

• Your files are better organized and are located in a smaller space, thus, they are easier and quicker to access.

• Your computer can locate and read files in a small partition faster than if it has to search your entire drive surface. This speeds up access to specific files and folders.

• You can reclaim unused disk space that would otherwise be wasted by utilizing smaller cluster sizes and smaller partitions.

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Cluster and Cluster Size

In preparing your disk so that it can be used most efficiently, your computer pre-organizes the space on a disk in order to manage the reading and writing of files. The file system is created for every floppy, hard disk, removable disk and partition on a drive prior to its first format. You can think of it as drawing the lines on the paper to help you to write on it and read from it easily. Windows and DOS will organize the space on the disk into clusters (the sheet of paper with lines on them). The maximum number of clusters that Windows and DOS can allocate is 65,536 cluster in any partition, regardless of size. Clusters will vary in size because all partitions have the same maximum number of clusters (65,653) therefore the larger the partition, the larger the cluster size.

What does this mean? Your OS can allocate up to 65,536 clusters on each partition, the clusters on a 200 meg partition can be much smaller than on a 1 gig drive. Thus, larger drives potentially waste more space than a smaller drive. For example; you have a one-gig partition with 32 k cluster size and a file that is exactly 32k in size. This file occupies one cluster. If you were to add one character to the file and increase its size to 33k, the system would allocate another sector to the store the file. The 33k file is now occupying 64k of hard disk space. Since two different files cannot occupy the same cluster, there is 32k of wasted space.

By dividing the drive into partitions, you can maximize the space of the drive. The same 32k file on a 100 meg partition with 2k clusters would occupy 16 clusters adding the single character to the file only uses another 2k. While this is still somewhat wasteful, it does yield a savings of 30k. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see the potential waste that can occur on drives that are larger than necessary. Working with very large files a large cluster size lets you store your files on fewer clusters. This can be an improvement performance wise, but larger cluster sizes can waste disk space if you have lots of small files as well. The tripleDAT cutter files are very small; on average, 3k while the audio files are gargantuan by comparison. What is the best in this situation? Find out the result of my benchmark tests next month.

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Creating a partition

DOS and Windows use a program called "FDISK" to create partitions and file systems on your hard disk. Unfortunately, changing the partition on your drive with FDISK means "loosing all data" that is on the disk, thus you have to back it up before proceeding. After creating or modifying your partition, you will have to reinstall and restore your system from the backup. DOS and Windows do not offer any way of changing the cluster size and it is automatically set to the maximum for the partition size.

You can only create a maximum of 4 physical partitions on a disk. This was OK for smaller capacity disks (<>500mb) but larger disks can prove inefficient. You can however create an extended partition in which you can create subsequent logical partitions. There are three different types of partitions:

Primary - The physical portion of the hard drive from which you can start your computer and Windows. Your C:\drive is your primary Partition.

Extended - a physical partition that can be divided into multiple, logical sections that will be seen as partitions. An extended partition cannot contain "boot" information because this drive is only seen "after" the operating system starts.

Logical - a portion of an extended partition that the OS sees as an actual partition. The Logical partition will only be available after the extended partition where they reside is recognized. Like the extended partition, logical partitions cannot contain boot information.

Confused yet?

Each of these partitions are known as FAT (File Allocation Table) systems, because a table of contents for the partitions is created to find files in those partitions. This table holds records identifying the files in the partition and the blocks of data associated with those files. The size of these records can vary depending on partition size. Fat 16 uses 16 bit records to locate a file and its starting location with in the partition and Fat 32 uses a 32 bit record. FAT 32 supports larger physical partitions (up to two terabytes). Fat 32 has some advantages over FAT 16. The cluster size varies greatly to conserve wasted space. For example:

Unfortunately Windows 95 has no facility to let you choose a cluster size in a given partition and your are forced to use the defaults (WIN98 has the feature to convert an existing fat but will not change the partition size without deleting the partition table and starting over). There are a number of second party software developers that offer products to let you not only partition your drives easily, but allow for a cluster size change as you see fit without data loss.

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Disk Fragmentation