Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 14:23:02 +0300 (IDT)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
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To: Sunil V <sunilv AT accord-soft DOT com>
cc: djgpp <djgpp AT delorie DOT com>
Subject: Re: Default File Size Blocks in Win95
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On Thu, 17 Jun 1999, Sunil V wrote:

> I have observed that when you create a file in Win 95, even if the file
> is of size 1 byte it
> takes up 16 K Bytes or 32 K Bytes of secondary memory. File size
> allocation is always in terms of multiples of this block size. Is there
> a way by which the default block size could be changed to something
> lower.

Welcome to the wonderful world of FAT filesystems!

Yes, space is allocated to files in multiples of a cluster size, which in 
most modern (i.e. large) disks is between 16K and 64K bytes.

The cluster size is determined by the size of the disk partition, so the 
only way to make it smaller is to partition your disk to several logical 
drives.  For example, instead of on 2GB-large disk, you can partition it 
into 2 1GB disks and cut the cluster size in half.

There's also the FAT32 filesystem, with much smaller cluster size (4KB for
most disks in use today, I think) which is hyped by Microsoft as the
panacea from all such problems.  But I don't recommend reformatting your
drive to FAT32, since that will tremendously slow down your system (I've
seen 4-fold slowdown in some disk-intensive applications). 

Of course, if your disk is large enough, you can simply turn a blind eye 
to the waste ;-)