How to view the cluster size of an NTFS file system?
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How to view the cluster size of an NTFS file system?
For other file systems, the "fsck" tool can be used with the -n (read-only) and -v (verbose) switches, to show the cluster size. For example:
Code:
fsck.exfat -n -v /dev/mmcblk0p1
However, given that NTFS is a proprietary Microsoft file system, support by operating systems outside Windows relies on reverse-engineering and has therefore been limited for a long time. File system checking is even more difficult to implement than normal reading and writing, so appears to be no "fsck.ntfs" so far.
Is there any tool which just shows the cluster size of NTFS?
(Yes, I know, "NTFS file system" is a redundant acronym, but I have to write it like this for clarity.)
If you want control, don't use proprietary on FOSS.
You want to know details, go look on Windows
That's understandable for complicated stuff like file system repair (chkdsk, fsck), but something as simple as seeing the cluster size should be doable on Linux.
I am trying to use as little proprietary stuff as possible. Unfortunately, much of the world is stuck with Windows and MacOS. Android OS only recently implemented read-only NTFS support.
Thankfully, external HDD and SSD manufacturers have switched from NTFS to exFAT. Until the mid-2010s, external hard disks were commonly pre-formatted with NTFS. Why not FAT32? Because 4 GiB.
Now that Microsoft has open-sourced exFAT (thanks alot!), it has become the de-facto standard for file systems without a garbage 4 G file size limitation.
The cluster size of an NTFS filesystem is one of the filesystem parameters found in the VBR (Volume Boot Record), and is pretty well documented and discussed, such as
at http://kcall.co.uk/ntfs/index.html.
Interesting article (I was already aware of it), however, it has no mention of cluster sizes.
But it contains a link to the official documentation where you can find related information (especially paragon have not yet developed any tools for that).
Anyway the other way is to use the ntfs-3g tools, like ntfsinfo (which was mentioned too). It is documented here: https://github.com/tuxera/ntfs-3g (but I think you know that)
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