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Date:      Fri, 12 Apr 2002 20:44:08 -0700
From:      Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org>
To:        Lord Raiden <raiden23@netzero.net>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Curious question about wasted disk space
Message-ID:  <20020412204408.B34738@xor.obsecurity.org>
In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20020412232846.009597a0@pop.netzero.net>; from raiden23@netzero.net on Fri, Apr 12, 2002 at 11:33:58PM -0400
References:  <4.2.0.58.20020412232846.009597a0@pop.netzero.net>

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On Fri, Apr 12, 2002 at 11:33:58PM -0400, Lord Raiden wrote:
> 	This was something that came to me while I was fiddling with one of the=
=20
> servers and I've never thought to ask about it before.  But what I was=20
> wondering is what the free disk space waste is on an NFS file=20
> system?  Freebsd is supposed to use NFS for its file system and since I=
=20
> don't lile to deal with file systems more than I have to, it never=20
> interested me before.  But I know that one of the problems that the MSfat=
=20
> systems have issues with is lost disk space due to clustering.  NTFS has=
=20
> the same issues.  But does the freebsd file system have those issues and =
if=20
> so, to what extent?  I'm just asking cause I'm not even sure where to sta=
rt=20
> searching for such answers.  Thanks for the tips.  :)

NFS is the Network File System..it's what's used for mounting remote
filesystems located on another machine.

The default FreeBSD local filesystem is the Fast File System (FFS).

It doesn't gratuitously waste space like FAT16 does on large disks
(where you have to make the cluster sizes ridiculously large to get
around the 16-bit addressing), but it has the same property that most
(all?) filesystems have in that space for files is allocated in chunks
(e.g. a 112-byte file won't take up 112 bytes on disk, it's allocated
inside a larger chunk of disk space, say 2048 bytes).

Space is first allocated in 'fragments' (default size used to be 1024
bytes, now is 2048 bytes), then in 'blocks' (old default 8192 bytes,
now 16384 bytes) when the file gets too big to fit in a fragment. You
can tune these parameters when you create the filesystem with newfs,
but the current defaults are optimal for modern-sized disks.

Kris


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