[TriLUG] Disk space calculations in Linux

[Kevin Hunter]

You're at the limits of my knowledge of specifics, but the gist is 
exactly your question: yes.  It depends on the size of files stored on 
your filesystem.

If you haven't changed anything, your filesystem is likely set to 
allocate blocks in 4k chunks.  So, if you have a lot of small files, you 
lose whatever the difference is ( 4k - size(file) ) per file.

This is one of the advantages that ReiserFS touts: it can fold small 
files directly into the index for both higher percentage use and quicker 
access.  For reference, the linux default is ext2/3.

All that said, my memory is shakey on this ground, so I hereby advise 
you to do your own research.

Kevin

At 6:53p -0500 on 24 Jan 2008, William Sutton wrote:
> While we're discussing... how much space gets wasted in overhead of files 
> that allocate a particular block size but don't use all of the blocks?