🚀 go-pugleaf

Is it possible to specify the size of the allocation units (clusters) used
by a hard drive?

I used to have a 120MB drive that used 2KB allocation units, but when I
upgraded to a 210MB drive the allocation units were increased to 4KB. The
problem with this is that 9% of my drive (about 18.7MB) is going to waste.

Obviously there is an algorithm that tries to maintain about the same
number of allocation units regardless of the size of the drive (within
certain upper and lower limits). I would assume this is to to keep from
running out of bits in the FAT, but MS-DOS 5.0 can handle up to 2
gigabytes, which is an order of magnitude larger than my 210MB drive
(although then I'd guess you would end up with 32KB allocation units). 

A few calculations show that if I'm limited by a 16-bit FAT I should still
have enough "address" space to reduce my allocation units to 3KB. Can this
be done? How?

Soon I might be upgrading to a 340MB drive. Then I'll be stuck with at
least 5KB allocation units unless DOS bumps that up to 8KB. I wonder if
DOS 6.0 will bost the FAT up to 24 or 32 bits...any third party software
to do this?

 -Tom

tmetro@lynx.dac.northeastern.edu