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Date:      Fri, 10 May 1996 15:17:50 -0400
From:      Parag Chhibber <pchhibbe@attila.stevens-tech.edu>
To:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Allocation Unit and File System in General
Message-ID:  <2.2.32.19960510191750.006baf38@attila.stevens-tech.edu>

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Hi.

I was wondering what type of file system is used by FreeBSD, and more
importantly, what are the size of the allocation units?

In DOS (which sucks) the file system supports names of 8+3 with allocation
unit sizes differing depending on the partition size as follows:

Hard Disk               Allocation Unit
Minimum Size            

0 MB                    512 bytes
32 MB                   1024 bytes (1 KB)
64 MB                   2048 bytes (2 KB)
128 MB                  4096 bytes (4 KB)
256 MB                  8192 bytes (8 KB)
512 MB                  16384 bytes (16 KB)
1024 MB                 32768 bytes (32 KB)
2048 MB                 65536 bytes (64 KB)
and so on...

This means that if you have a 1.2 GB drive, in DOS, if you leave it as 1
partition, your allocation unit is 32 KB.  If you split the drive into 3
partitions, your allocation untis is 8 KB.

Basically your allocation unit is the minimum multiple that your actual file
size must take up.  (For example, with 32 KB allocation units, files less
then 32 KB take up 32 KB, and files greater then that take up multiples of
32 KB rounding up.)

My question is how are allocation units handled in FreeBSD, because with
disk striping and such, disk sizes can become pretty big.

Sorry for the length of this question, but I got carried away...

Thanks in advance for all your time and effort.
Parag Chhibber =============================================================
Stevens Institute of Technology		Home Address:
S-247, Technology Hall #608		15 Powderhorn Drive
Castle Point on the Hudson		Kinnelon, New Jersey 07405-2936
Hoboken, New Jersey, 07030		(201) 492 - 2698
(201) 216 - 3611

E-mail:
mailto:parag@gsi.gsini.net

WWW:
http://gsi.gsini.net/~parag/	
http://attila.stevens-tech.edu/~pchhibbe/
=============================================================================




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