BeeJ said:
Went to Computer Management and found that the drive was not allocated.
Sigh!
Now it asks
Convert To Dynamic - no thank you
Convert To GPT - what is this. Googled but still confused.
Create A New Simple Volume
I plan to use the drive with Win 7 Pro 64 eSata and Win XP Pro USB
interfaces so it need to be compatible.
Looks like Simple Volume will have 8MByte sectors. My tiny text files
will eat disk space.
Which format is best?
What will support compression and be Win 7 and XP compatible?
Multiple partitions would be OK but not necessary.
You say in your original post, it's a "2T" drive.
Up to "2.2T", you can treat the drive as an ordinary one.
"Create A New Simple Volume" sounds fine.
When you buy a 3T or 4T drive, come back and see us
for special instructions.
*******
GPT or GUID Partition Table, is a way to handle larger disks.
The support tables, about 2/3rds down the page, tell you which
OSes support that form of partitioning. Booting from GPT,
may require a motherboard with UEFI or EFI or something.
So it's not exactly easy to meet all the requirements, if
you're using a computer that's a few years old.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table
You don't have to use GPT with a 3T or 4T disk. The
disk companies offer a special driver, which converts
a large physical disk, into several "virtual" disks,
each disk being a fraction of the original size. So
a 3T physical disk, because 1T + 1T + 1T virtual
disks, each of which could have four partitions or
whatever on it. You would check the support page
for your purchased product, to see a listing of
options available for it. [ The special driver
is for internal disks, plugged into a motherboard
connector. Rather than for USB enclosure drives.
For USB, then GPT would be the option as far as
I know. ]
*******
Select Simple Volume.
Place a single partition on the disk and make it NTFS.
You can leave the cluster size at 4KB. You can
enable compression on the entire partition if you want,
but I'd only do that if you know you're going to need
the space that provides.
Say, for example, you use a backup tool which has its
own form of compression. If the NTFS also has compression
enabled, it's not going to help. It only slows things
down. Turning on NTFS compression makes sense, if
you know the content is compressible. If all the files
are text, then NTFS compression could give 2:1 or 3:1
lossless compression for you. If you had nothing but
Adobe Acrobat PDF documents (which are already partially
compressed), then the NTFS compression isn't going to
save very much.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS
"The following are a few limitations of NTFS:
Compression
The compression algorithms in NTFS are designed to
support cluster sizes of up to 4 kB. When the cluster
size is greater than 4 kB on an NTFS volume,
NTFS compression is not available.
Maximum cluster size
The maximum cluster size is 64 kB.
"
FAT32 is the one where the user is more likely to be
fooling around with cluster size.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat32#FAT32
"For the common sector size 512 /A:64K yields
128 sectors per cluster."
I think that's a 64K cluster.
If you wanted to make the 2T drive FAT32 for the whole
thing, you'd use this formatter. Since Disk Management
won't allow you to format it FAT32, you finish up with
Disk Management first (so you get a drive letter assigned),
then use this to actually format it (basically, a
"quick format").
http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm
It allows a user to adjust cluster size. But for a 2T
disk, I doubt there's any option there, if you were
to make the whole disk FAT32. Based on the example on
that web page, I think this would make 64K clusters
(128 sectors times 512 bytes per sector), on the disk.
fat32format -c128 f:
Don't use FAT32. The above information was only presented
for fun. Use NTFS.
While you have options on NTFS as well, for exotic cluster
sizes, generally all available features work with the default
4KB cluster size (perhaps compression and encryption, that
sort of thing). If you feel you'll be storing nothing but
big files, and a larger cluster is more efficient, then
forget about using the other features. As they'll be disabled.
My personal choice here, is to leave the default 4KB in
place. My new 2T, is one big NTFS with 4KB cluster.
One other poster here, has experimented with larger clusters.
I just don't want any headaches (since I have no where to
move the data off the disk, if it needs repair work).
HTH,
Paul
