disk fun

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Feb 21, 2003 at 04:09:44PM +0100, Roger Oberholtzer wrote:
>
>This is interesting:
>
>When I have some images (over 587000 of them) on a ext3-format partition,
>they take 19737878 bytes (19.7 GB). When these same files are on a vfat
>partition, they take 27154592 (27.1 GB). Same images. Just copied freshly to
>the windows disk, so there is no fragmentation.
>
>I guess this is because linux file systems (all?) only take roughly the
>space needed for each file, no matter what the size. Windows vfat takes 64K
>for each file, even if it is 1 byte in size. The images are mainly under
>64K, so the amount of each file that is under 64 K is wasted on the disk by
>windows.
>
>And you wonder why we don't like windows. And disk sellers love it.
>
>Of course, NTFS is supposed to be better about this, but I won't test it.

I think you'll find that if you copied them to a reiserfs, they would take
considerably less space than ext[23].  I don't have any xfs experience so
can't compare utilization there.

Bill
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