Does Fat32 align its clusters?

[pointertovoid]

This meant aligning the executable code with 4kiB pages so W98 could transfer them directly from HDD to L2.

It makes no difference to W95, and with W98 only at the older executable that were not compiled aligned, like Office97.

In these not quite common configuration, the executable alignment tool did improve application load time by 20%.

[ricardrosen]

Bumping this thread about the use of Oformat.exe (dated 2006 - file from xp sp3 deployment tools) to  format and align fat32 disks.

It is an updated Winme Format.com with no fat32 size limit and a  new /A command-line option: to align FAT data clusters at a specified sector. Specifically, the /A:8 option can be used to format the volume so that the FAT data clusters are aligned at 4K boundaries.
Does this solve the problem in this thread (after of course first aligning the partition itself to a 4k boundary).

[jaclaz]

12 hours ago, ricardrosen said:

Does this solve the problem in this thread (after of course first aligning the partition itself to a 4k boundary).

Yes and no.

At the time Steve6375 did a lot of tests and reported results on reboot.pro (which right now is offline ):

reboot.pro/topic/16783-rmprepusb-faster-fat32-write-access-on-flash-memory-drives/

There is/was some further minor improvements with - if I recall correctly - aligning the first data cluster past the volume label, and then there is a possible advantage depending on the actual "page size" of the flash memory/controller.

In any case this only affects (noticeably) "slow" media such as USB sticks, for those Steve made the provision in RMPREPUSB:

https://rmprepusb.blogspot.com/2014/06/increase-speed-of-your-sd-card-or-flash.html

jaclaz