Stephen Lavedas wrote in message <36C### [at] virginiaedu>...
> of course you realize that there are no
>appreciable HD savings in this version since the minimum sector size is
>4k and so any file less than 4K in size takes up 4K anyhow...


Maybe on =your= disk.

In NTFS, the MFT record which stores the demographics of the file can store
the contents too, if it is short.  So there is =no= space allocated for the
file besides the MFT record which holds the name(s), size, permissions,
dates, etc.  On some UNIX file systems, data of a few hundred bytes can be
stuffed in the iNode, which is the same principle.

So on NTFS, all files take exactly 1K for the MFT (master file table)
record, plus consume a couple bytes in an index (how the directories are
kept).  If the content is a few hundred bytes, it will go in the MFT too and
the file only takes 1K.

After that, it allocates clusters, where the cluster size is fully
configurable at format time.  I use fairly small clusters to prevent just
this kind of waste.  Microsoft's documentation claims, in all its wisdom,
that a smaller cluster size will increase fragmentation.  But on a fast SCSI
drive it's never been a problem, and I can always defragment if needed.
Anyway, a data drive could easily have clusters of 1K or 2K, not the
wasteful 4K.  One could even use half a K per cluster.

--John

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