(1) Two or more systems working together. See clustering.
(2) Also called an "allocation unit" or "file allocation unit," it is some number of disk sectors that are treated as a unit. A cluster is the smallest unit of storage the operating system's file system can manage. That means if a 1KB file is stored in a system with a 32KB cluster (see table below), the 1KB file takes up 32KB of disk space. Following are the cluster sizes for the FAT file systems on Windows/DOS computers. See FAT, FAT32 and lost cluster.
FAT16
Disk Size Cluster size
0-128MB 2KB
128-256MB 4KB
256-512MB 8KB
512MB-1GB 16KB
1-2GB 32KB
FAT32
Disk Size Cluster size
512MB-8GB 4KB
8-16GB 8KB
16-32GB 16KB
32GB+ 32KB
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