How disk cluster size affects data recovery processes Now that you understand the basics of performing a simple file recovery using EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard 4.0.1, the next step is to understand how disk cluster size affects data recovery. But before we talk about disk clusters, we want to mention that the Data Recovery Wizard treats the FAT and FAT-32 file systems very differently from the NTFS file system. However, this difference is in the Data Recovery Wizard itself. When it works, you won't see any different between them. Hence, we want to you understand more about disk clusters for better understanding the working elements of our product EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard 4.0.1. Since our goal in this article is to teach you some basics, we'll focus only on FAT and FAT-32. (We had shown you how to apply what you have learned to NTFS in an earlier article which named NTFS Documents.) Although it may look intimidating, the Data Recovery Wizard interface itself is fairly simple. But to make good use of it, you need to understand something about how the file system makes use of the physical disk. What is a disk cluster? A disk cluster is the smallest unit of space that you can allocate on a disk. But don't think of a cluster as being able to hold one byte of data; a cluster's size varies depending on the disk's size and format. Think of a disk cluster as a non-divisible block of space. When you save a file, that file is placed into clusters. If a file is larger than the hard disk's cluster size, the file will span multiple clusters (sometimes referred to as a cluster chain). But a file often does not use all the space in the chain's last cluster. When this happens, the remaining space in that cluster is wasted. A cluster cannot be shared by multiple files. Why a disk cluster's size depends on the hard disk's size and file system Why does a cluster's size vary depending on the hard disk's size and file system? To see why, let's look at the FAT file system. As a 16-bit file system, it is limited to using a maximum of 65,536 clusters. Because the hard disk is limited to using a fixed number of clusters, the disk cluster size must change depending on the capacity of the partition. To calculate the disk cluster size, take the size of the partition and divide it among the number of available clusters. For example, the maximum size of a FAT-16 partition is 2 GB.