Wasted Space

The wasted space is the amount of space in clusters on your hard disk, that are not entirely filled. Keep the following formula in mind: size + wasted space = allocated space. A FAT32 file system may have very large cluster sizes, dependent on the partition size:

FAT32
Partition Size	Default Cluster Size
01 - 08 GB	4 KB
08 - 16 GB	8 KB
16 - 32 GB	16 KB
>32 GB	32 KB

E.g. if you have a single FAT32 partition on a 32GB hard disk, you have a cluster size of 32KB on it. If you store 10 files of 1 KB on this partition, this would use 10*32KB=320KB of your precious hard disk space, and 320KB-10KB=310KB would be wasted. An especially huge number of small files significantly increases the amount of wasted space on FAT partitions.

To reduce the wasted space, there are the following possibilities:

•	Make smaller partitions, try to avoid partitions larger than 16GB on a FAT32 drive. Of course smaller partitions will increase the number of drive letters.

•	Since Windows NT, Windows provides the possibility to format your hard disk with the NTFS file system. It usually operates with 512 - 4096 Byte clusters and has the best storage efficiency of all Windows file systems. In addition, NTFS is able to compress selected directory branches.