file space question

[Bruce Evans]

On Mon, 31 May 2004, Vulpes Velox wrote:

> Does ufs have the same problem like FAT32, in that if a file exists,
> it will all ways take up atleast 4KB or so, no matter how little data
> it contains?

Not exactly.   ufs has fragments, which normally have size 1/8 of the
block size, so a 1 byte file normally only takes 1/8 of the block size.
However, the default block size is 16K, so fragments usually take up
at least 2K.  If nonstandard block and fragment sizes are used, then
the minimum is the same for ufs and msdosfs:

	ufs: block size 4096, frag size 512
	msdosfs: block size 512

With FAT32, 512-byte blocks can cover fairly large disks.  IIRC, there
can be 2^28 clusters for FAT32, so the maximum is 2^28*512 = 128GB.
The default block size for msdosfs originally grew large (up to 32K
or 64K) back when there was only FAT16 and the limit was 2^16 or 2^15
clusters.  2*16*32K is just 2GB, so even with the too-large block size
of 32K wasn't large enough for new disks about 10 years ago.  Since then,
4K has become the default for most cases since it is a good i/o size
(still a little too small, but OK with some buffering), and because
using a reasonably large block size helps stops the FAT size from
beoming preposterously large (2^28 clusters takes 1GB for the FAT).

Also, msdosfs has much smaller metadata overheads than ufs, so it can
hold a lot of small files in the space that ufs would use for metadata.
The wastage is very noticable on small file systems like ones that fit
on floppy disks.

Bruce