Can new HDD be partitioned and formatted thru windows program

Well I did what you said, I put it in another slot, but now it tells me the driver I have is incorrect. I took it back out and wrote down everything on it, have tried 2 other drivers, but none work.
At my wits end here. The card is a ( Motorola 62412-51,U1036-1-06-0006. P/N: 2007005-HP156M 2002804251, SHINMEL 1.0A 30YOC. 1.0A 1200VACm ATS-369 ATECH, CE 0197X. ) That is everything written that I could find off of this thing. I contacted Motorola, they no longer have drivers for this one, so they say, I went to Driverguide.com, tried a couple of their's, still won't work.
Don't know what else to do other than buying a new one. Does anyone have a good resolution for me.

1. Try this driver:
HERE

Or

This one (Half way down the page) under Windows click on the link to download.

HERE

Some additional reading

Here

Quote:

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Originally posted by Train

512 MB - 8,191 MB clusters are 4 KB
8,192 MB - 16,383 MB clusters are 8 KB
16,384 MB - 32,767 MB clusters are 16 KB
32,768 MB and above clusters are 32 KB

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Question - The Seagate drive I have just formatted let me choose the clustersize independent of the partition size. E.g. 30GB partition, 4 kb cluster.

Can that be? (+), (-) of this ?

KGG,

Yes, you can choose non-default cluster sizes for partitions using various 3rd party tools. And in many cases there may be no problem in doing so. However, in some cases there can be. For instance, certain of Windows disk maintenance tools balk or can cause problems when run and on partitions where the cluster size has been set to something other than the MS default.

A note on partition and cluster size choice... There can be advantages to having partitions where smaller clusters are used, such as minimizing slack space. But there can also be disadvantages, depending on such things as the size mix of one's files, file access patterns, and certain settings. Some examples...

Smaller clusters may result in defrag running faster. However, this can/will also lead to greater fragmentation in the first place. Say ya have a bunch of 2MB files. With say 4k clusters each file would take 512 clusters, with 16k clusters each would take 128 clusters. In the 4k case that means each file is broken in to 512 pieces (a cluster being the smallest allocation unit), which could be (could become) scattered all over the disk. But in the 16k case there could exist at most only 128 fragments spread out (non-contiguous) for each file. The result: greater fragmentation (or the potential), and perhaps even a greater amount of defrag time (because of more work to be done). Now you might deal with this by doing things like altering the default setting for the contiguous chuck size windows looks for when allocating space, defragging more frequently, etc. But it isn't necessarily so that smaller clusters reduce fragmentation and/or reduce defrag time.

Also, when a file occupies more clusters it can lead to general i/o preformance (related) degredation. For example, the more clusters a file occupies the more FAT entries there must be for the file (obviously). This can/will lead to more reads (cluster lookups) an writes to the FAT that must take place when i/o is performed on the file, thus more "work' needs to be done in regard to i/o operations. More work means reduced performance. Plus, there can/will be more reads and writes to the disk (reading/writing the file itself), so there can be more potential work needed on the i/o side. And if the clusters are spread out (which, again, might be more likely with smaller clusters) there can increased delays due to read/write head (re)positioning, etc. How much extra work, how much of an impact will it this all have? Will the impact (performance hit) be significant? It depends, but it could be.

So if slack space is the only/overriding concern then fine: go for the smallest cluster size. But there can be things worth considering other than or along with slack space in looking at cluster size.

Excellent explanation DrMDJ. I was suspecting what you so thoroughly and understandably spelled out.
I will thus go back to my usual setup and keep the partitions based on desired need and let WIN handle the cluster sizes.
Thank you
:)
KGG