A Hard Disk Drive (HDD) is provided two FATs and two cluster sizes, a
regular cluster and a "Supercluster". In one example, each Supercluster
is the size of four regular clusters. A second Supercluster FAT is added
(FAT2) which works in a similar manner to the original FAT (hereinafter
FAT1), but instead points to the next Supercluster in the chain. Since
there are far fewer Superclusters than clusters, the Supercluster FAT
(FAT2) can be stored in a cache memory. When data is streamed to and from
the hard drive, it can be streamed to Superclusters and no seeks on the
HDD to a FAT are required, as the FAT2 is cached in memory. Access time
to and from the hard drive is decreased. The original cluster
configuration is still supported. During lulls in system operation, the
FAT2 data may be written to the drive and moreover, FAT1 data created and
"flushed" to the hard drive. Thus, if the HDD is read by a standard
computer system, it will recognize the regular clusters from the FAT1
table in a transparent manner (and ignore the FAT2 table).