The NTFS filesystem used by Vista can handle more than four billion clusters,
resulting in much smaller cluster sizes. Now, four billion clusters, at 4 kilobytes
each, gives NTFS a maximum partition size of 14.9 terabytes (15,259
GB). Of course, if this drive were commercially available, its manufacturer
would contend that 1 terabyte is equal to 1,000,000,000,000 bytes, and market
the unit as a 16.4 TB (16,384 GB) drive.
You can see how much space is wasted by any given file by right-clicking on
the file icon, selecting Properties, and comparing the Size value with the Size
on disk value. The same works for multiple selected files and folders; highlight
all the objects in your root directory to see the total amount of wasted space
on your drive. To find the current cluster size of your drive, just open the properties
sheet for a small file you know will only consume a single cluster (such as
a Windows Shortcut); its Size on disk will be equal to the size of one cluster.
Table 5-2. Filesystems supported by recent versions of Windows (continued)
FAT FAT32 NTFS
256 | Chapter 5: Performance
Convert your drives to NTFS
If you??™ve upgraded your PC from an earlier version of Windows, there??™s a
chance you??™re still using the FAT32 filesystem. Assuming you don??™t need to
keep FAT32 for compatibility with other operating systems, you should convert
your drive to NTFS. The process is easy, relatively quick, and won??™t
harm your data (although you should back up beforehand just to be safe).
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