Stephen wrote: -Hi, - -I took advantage of the mid-winter lull to experiment with my audio ATA -drive (Quantum KA 13.6 gig) formatted in FAT32 (4k clusters). It was working -fine, with minimal operating overhead as per Logic's Performance meters -(barely reading). - -But I recently strongly recommended to use FAT16, as it uses a larger -cluster size: less seeking for the HD heads is supposed to increase reading -efficiency and extend the drive's lifespan. Many PC-for-Audio sites -recommend this. - -<snip> - -But it seems I'm getting lower performance instead of better. I'm confused. -Does anyone know why? You should definitely use FAT 32. Current Ultra-ATA drives and controllers will perform much better. HOWEVER, you had the right idea regarding cluster size. Good news: you can format in FAT 32 with a larger cluster size. For audio or video disks, this is EXACTLY what you should do, as you drastically reduce the number of seeks your drive will have to make to find any given data. Small clusters are good for system drives, or general office work, since you have a lot of files. Large clusters are optimal for large file sizes, since the wasted space used by incompletely filled clusters is a small percentage of the total file size. I use 32K cluster size on my 18 GB audio disk (one partition) and it works great. I don't remember the exact command to indicate the cluster size when formatting, but you should be able to find it easily. Hope this helps, /Steve Steve Keller Software Engineer, Online Electronic Arts, Inc. EMail: skeller@... Ph: 650/628-7056