                      Clusters, Sectors and Hard Drives
                                          
                              13 November, 1993
       
                                   6:07 PM
       
       Are you  planning to  buy a  new hard  drive  with  a  capacity
       greater than  127 MEGABYTES?  Do you  understand the  "straight
       skinny" about Sectors, Clusters, Kilobytes, and Megabytes? Well
       this little  program will  help you  decide how  to  FDISK  and
       FORMAT that  new MONSTER hard drive into Partitions that permit
       the smallest  Cluster size  thus saving MEGABYTES of disk space
       with small files.
       
       CLUSTER.COM is  a little  executable QuickBASIC  program  which
       just gives  you the  results of  some mathematical  formulas to
       calculate "bytes," "kilobytes," and "megabytes." Then let's you
       know what the maximum size hard drive you can make with:
       
       1. 2 kilobyte Clusters (2048 bytes/Cluster)
       2. 4 kilobyte Clusters (4096 bytes/Cluster)
       3. 8 kilobyte Clusters (8196 bytes/Cluster)
       
       You see...  a "kilobyte"  is NOT one-thousand (1,000) bytes but
       one-thousand and  twenty-four (1,024) bytes. This kind of stuff
       makes me  CRAZY as  the prefix  "kilo" means thousand so that a
       "kilogram" is a thousand grams and all other "kilos" are a nice
       round thousand... except in computer terms.
       
       I have  asked some  of the "computer experts" I know to explain
       how come  a "kilobyte" (K) is 1,024 bytes and a "megabyte" (MB)
       is 1,048,576  bytes. They  tell me  it makes  perfect sense  to
       them... but they CAN'T explain it to me.  Hence, I have written
       this small  QuickBASIC program  to "hard-wire" my thinking into
       "kilobytes."
       
       You see,  a byte  is a  computer unit  of data. By some strange
       thinking it  was decided  that a  kilobyte is  "2 to  the  10th
       power" or  as QuickBASIC  likes to see that formula as: "2^10."
       And... a megabyte is: "2^20."
       
       Now you  are asking  "So What?" and "Who Cares...?" Well you do
       even though you don't know it, yet.... You see even the laptops
       are over  100 megabytes  now with  some at  200 megabytes as we
       speak. In  the old  days (starting  with MS-DOS 5.0) with small
       hard drives;  when you "FDISKed" the hard drive and "FORMATted"
       it; you  usually  ended  up  with  two  kilobyte  (2048  bytes)
       Clusters.
       
       But now with the new version of WORD FOR WINDOWS 6.0 commanding
       24 megabytes  of disk  space and  Windows 3.1  needing about 15
       megabytes... you  need a  100 megabyte  laptop just to do fancy
       word processing.  Pop EXCEL 4.0, a game or twenty, a few fonts,
       and you are pushing the 100 MB envelope with just applications.
       
       What is  a Cluster? Well a Cluster is a place on the hard drive
       that MS-DOS writes one file. If you make a 100 byte batch file,
       it takes  up one Cluster and no other file enters that Cluster.
       So now..  the little  light bulb  probably has  gone on in your
       head as  you realize  that if  you have eight kilobyte Clusters
       and a  lot of  little files... you are LOSING MEGABYTES OF DISK
       SPACE.
       
       That is  a fact... and the reason I have spent the time writing
       this  text   file,  after   writing  the   QuickBASIC   program
       CLUSTER.BAS in this file set and then spending another hour (or
       more...) making  a PDQ  executable file  called CLUSTER.COM  to
       demonstrate these relationships.
       
       What's that?  Why didn't I ALSO make a program that allowed you
       to enter  the size of your hard drive with the output being the
       number of  two kilobyte  Clusters you could make from that hard
       drive? Well...  I thought about it but decided it was TOO DUMB.
       As, all  you need  to do  is divide your hard drive size by the
       numbers for the various Cluster sizes seen at the bottom of the
       screen.
       
       But, give  me an eloquent reason for making such a program, and
       I will probably do so... just for the code of it.
       
       John De Palma on CompuServe 76076,571
