Acronis os selector 8.0 User Manual

losses (waste) due to the adjustment of allocated space to cluster
boundaries.

The following table gives the approximate dependence of these losses (hard
disk waste) versus the cluster size:

Partition size

Cluster size

Wastes

<127M 2K

128

÷255M

4K 4%

256

÷511M

8K 10%

512

÷1023M

16K 25%

1024

÷2047M

32K 40%

2048

÷4096M

64K 50%

One of the ways to reduce losses is to break the disk space into smaller
partitions. The other is to use the FAT32 file system where 32 bits are
assigned to the cluster number (28 bits actually), raising the maximum
partition size to 4 terabytes. But FAT32 has its own drawback:

• If clusters size is small and partition size is big then the file allocation

table size increases, and may lead to slowing down the booting of the
operating system and file access.

2.7 Hidden

Partitions

Disk Administrator allows you to hide partitions. Hiding is done to prevent an
operating system from detecting a partition, assigning a letter to it and
accessing its files, i.e. the partition becomes invisible to the operating system
and the applications that run under it.

Hiding partitions is useful when important data should be protected from
unauthorized or occasional access. Unlike other software Acronis OS Selector
can hide any partition regardless of their type, or whether they exist as
primary or not. A special mode is provided to hide partitions for Windows NT,
2000, and XP operating systems.

Be careful when creating several primary partitions, and leaving all of them visible

since some operating systems (Windows 95/98/ME being first on the list) may

experience trouble in handling them.