Format SD card with FAT and custom file allocation unit size I'm using Maverick (a offline mapping application) on my Android device which has thousands of files in the tile cache with a size of 168 byte. The SD card is formatted with a file allocation unit size of 32 KB. This results for each file in a huge waste of space:

168 Byte (33 KB on the volume)


You can imagine that a 2GB is full even if you want to store 50MB of real data. Is there software I can use on my Mac to change the file allocation unit size during formatting of the device?
Open up a terminal and check out the following command:

NAME
     newfs_msdos -- construct a new MS-DOS (FAT) file system

SYNOPSIS
     newfs_msdos [-N] [-B boot] [-F FAT-type] [-I volid] [-O OEM]
                 [-S sector-size] [-a FAT-size] [-b block-size]
                 [-c cluster-size] [-e dirents] [-f format] [-h heads]
                 [-i info] [-k backup] [-m media] [-n FATs] [-o hidden]
                 [-r reserved] [-s total] [-u track-size] [-v volume-name]
                 special [disktype]


In particular these parameters:

 -S sector-size
         Number of bytes per sector.  Acceptable values are powers of 2 in
         the range 128 through 32768.

 -a FAT-size
         Number of sectors per FAT.

 -b block-size
         File system block size (bytes per cluster).  This should resolve
         to an acceptable number of sectors per cluster (see below).

 -c cluster-size
         Sectors per cluster.  Acceptable values are powers of 2 in the
         range 1 through 128.


You should be able to perform a custom format with the options you need, obviously make sure you test this out thoroughly.