Assignmentunit

An allocation unit (cluster) is a group of sectors on a hard disk or floppy disk. The number depends on the partition size and file system. There is approx 8 selectors per cluster. The operating system allocates a certain number of sectors to a cluster and then stops determine in which clusters the data is located. In principle, a file system can only address complete clusters. No single can Disk blocks or individual bytes are addressed within a cluster. Because of this, files on a volume always occupy a number of clusters. When the clusters are larger, less management overhead is used for large files, whereby the statistical fragmentation of a file is also reduced. Because for each file one half a cluster is wasted, larger clusters are disadvantageous here. The maximum number of clusters on a volume varies depending on the file system. The maximum is calculated from the maximum number of clusters and the selected cluster size File system size.