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Mon, 23 Feb 1998 11:56:03 -0800 |
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On 22 Feb 98 at 11:44, David Jonathan Justman wrote:
> 1. I have about 800Mb in use on my 1.5Gb hard Disk, and Nuts & Bolts
> reports that about 200Mb out of the 800 is slack. How do I get rid of
> it?
"Slack" space is space between the last data byte of a file, and
the end of the last cluster of file space allocated for that file.
[Clusters are also called "allocation units".]
If you're seeing a lot of slack space, there are two basic causes:
1. You have a lot of files. On average, each file winds up with
half a cluster of slack space.
2. You have large clusters. With 16-bit FAT, the number of clusters
on a volume is limited to 64K, and so the cluster size is increased
on larger volumes.
Solutions (in rough order of reliability/stability):
1. Live with it.
2. Adjust partition sizes, and thus cluster sizes, with Partition
Magic or other such utilities.
3. Install FAT32 (OSR2).
4. Compress your drive using DriveSpace or similar.
> 2. I have recently upgraded to 64Mb of RAM, and rarely hear the disk
> being accessed at all, except on bootup and occasionally during giant
> downloads, or once a session when downloading new mail. Should I care
> about the compactness of my disk at all?
You're not hitting virtual memory much, so there's a limit to how
much benefit you could get from fine-tuning it. I guess that's
basically a "no".
David G
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