A cluster is a disk-storage unit consisting of a fixed number of sectors that the operating system uses to read or write information. Even for a 1-byte file, one cluster must still be allocated in a FAT file system. In NTFS, if a file is this small, it can be stored in the MFT record itself without using additional clusters. When a file grows beyond the cluster boundary, another cluster is allocated. It means that the bigger the cluster size, the more disk space is wasted, however, the performance is better.
Read More»