Time: Tue Jun 03 23:56:23 1997
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Date: Tue, 03 Jun 1997 23:55:19 -0700
To: liberty-and-justice@pobox.com
From: Paul Andrew Mitchell [address in tool bar]
Subject: L&J: SLF: FAT16 problem: demonstration and proof
References: <3.0.1.16.19970603041137.2b5f5d34@pop.primenet.com>
Grier et al.,
I must confess to having made an
important error here. On a typical
Western Digital 2 GB drive, the
maximum cluster size is 32 KB,
not 64 KB. I had confused the
average, with the maximum.
The average waste is 0.5 x 32 KB = 16 KB
with Windows 3.11 and no HPFS.
I failed to read the fine manual (RTFM),
before writing what I did. My apologies.
But, with that said, the methodology was
still correct, as is yours below.
Thanks for the alternate route.
/s/ Paul Mitchell
http://www.supremelaw.com
At 11:51 PM 6/3/97 -0400, you wrote:
>Paul Andrew Mitchell wrote:
>>
>> Dear Friends,
>>
>> Several people have asked me for a safe
>> method of demonstrating the problem with
>> FAT16 partitions. I happened to stumble
>> upon the perfect test, when I was doing
>> general maintenance last weekend. I was
>> deleting unwanted files in the CACHE
>> directory utilized by NETSCAPE to store
>> web files which are downloaded from the
>> Internet. I did a DOS DIR command, both
>> before and after deleting all those files.
>> The DIR command shows the sum of the
>> individual file sizes, in bytes, and
>> also the amount of space available within
>> that partition. The discrepancy between
>> the sum, and the difference between space
>> available before the deletion, and space
>> available after the deletion, tells the
>> story.
>>
>>...<snip>
>>
>> Now, do the arithmetic:
>>
>> free bytes AFTER deletion: 244,088,832
>> free bytes BEFORE deletion: -239,140,864
>> ------------
>> difference: 4,947,968
>> bytes used BEFORE deletion: -751,202 (see DIR output)
>> ------------
>> difference: 4,196,766
>> / # files: / 146
>> ------------
>> TOTAL WASTED SPACE, FAT16: 28,745 bytes per file
>> ============
>>
>> So, if you have 1,000 files with FAT16,
>> you are wasting 1,000 x 28,745 = 28.7 MB!
>>
>> Your numbers may vary; the average will be
>> closer to a mean waste per file of 32K
>> (0.50 x 64K).
>
>Only if you are using 64K clusters on NT (the maximum
>cluster size prior to NT v4 was 32K).
>
>You don't really need to do a demonstration
>to prove that large clusters waste disk space.
>Just realize that:
> 1) disk space is allocated in chunks called clusters
> 2) on average, each file will only fill up only half
> of the last cluster allocated to it
> 3) run the numbers on your system
> a) type "chkdsk" at a DOS prompt, and it will
> report the number of bytes per "allocation unit"
> (cluster)
> b) type "dir c:\ /s" at a DOS prompt, and it will
> tell you the total number of files on your
> c: drive
> c) multiply the total number of files by half of
> the cluster size to get an estimate of the
> dead (wasted) space on your c: drive
>
>grier
>
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