However, the hard drive can't use the rest of that 248KB of space because it would have no way to reference it if it did. The HDD will put that into block 1, which means there is another 248KB of free space left in that block (256-8).

Now say you go to put your very first file on this drive, and it's an 8KB file. These numbers are also essentially what your MBR/GPT will reference when it goes to look for a file. Your computer basically divides your HDD into a bunch of 256KB blocks, and gives them numbers. So for your example of a 256KB allocation size.

There was a post somewhere which said that allocation size merely meant amount of space allocated for each portion of data will be 1/2 the size of the allocation size, which i didnt really understand but again, not that important I suppose.Īllocation size is the smallest amount of space that data can take up on your hard drive.

Thanks for the link, I had already formatted it to exFAT with 256kb of allocation size, while the recommended is 128kb, but i dont think it will make much of a difference

Exfat vs ntfs ssd