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I've been asked to format a USB Drive with a larger Allocation Unit Size than the default. I'm using a Mac, Snow Leopard. In Disk Utility, I am unable to see anything to do with Allocation Unit Size. A bit of Googling suggests it might be called Cluster Size, but I can't see anything for that, either. Does anyone know if it's possible to format a drive with FAT and use a larger than default Allocation Unit Size / Cluster Size?

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You should be able to do this from a command line using the newfs_msdos command. For example:

#> newfs_msdos -F 32 -V somevolumename /dev/youdiskdevice

The command takes many arguments that you may want to explore.. -c cluster-size for example.

I am sure you could google around for newfs_msdos for some usage examples and also man newfs_msdos

Hope this helps!

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Yep, that does appear to have the answer, thanks. The -c option says "Sectors per cluster. Acceptable values are powers of 2 in the range 1 through 128", and I had been expecting a size in bytes... so if I was to want 32KB (the value that I've been told to use), what value do I choose? 15, since 2^15 is 32,768...? – Kenny Mar 26 '12 at 21:47

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