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Disk cluster sizes and OS X

I've noticed that my partition, which is Mac OS Extended (case sensitive, journaled) is using a cluster size of 4096 bytes. I also *SEEM* to remember, although I'm not sure if it's still valid, that discs could be formatted UFS.

On some older Unix and Linux systems, the default cluster size was often determined by the size of the disc, and on some it could be over written.

The question is, if you format a disk (I'm thinking of a firewire remote disc in this case) using OS X, will the cluster size always be 4K, or is it configurable based on the type of file system.

Thanks in advance.

Several Apples, Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on Apr 28, 2009 3:15 PM

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Posted on Apr 28, 2009 3:31 PM

HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) always uses 4096 byte allocation blocks. The older Mac file system (HFS) was limited to 65.536 allocation blocks, so had to use larger allocation blocks on large disk drives.
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Disk cluster sizes and OS X

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