formatting question

[nosaj13]

i have an adata 4 gb sd card am trying to reformat it to fat32..in pocket mechanic i have the option to change the cluster size..what does that mean?

[Greymane21]

A cluster is the smallest amount of storage space that can be allocated for a file. If you set a cluster size of 4 kb and you save a lot of 500 byte files, you can see the waste.

The smaller the clusters, the less wasted space for small files, but there is a balance between cluster size and possible wasted space. If you set a large cluster size, you will waste a lot of space, but setting a very small cluster size can impact performance a bit.

[rlarson_mn]

This was far more important when hard drive were expensive. Today hard drives are so large and so reasonable more do not worry about the cluster size but what format to use (fat 32 or ntfs).