FatWaste v1.0 ------------- FatWaste v1.0 is a program to determine the amount of space wasted by FAT on your drive's filesystem. FatWaste is a Win32 console program, which should run under both Windows 95 and Windows NT. It has been tested under Windows 95. It may or may not run under Win32s--you're welcome to try it, but use under Win32s is unsupported. FatWaste is Copyright(c) 1996 by Russ Woodroofe. LICENSE ------- By downloading and using this software, you agree to the terms in this license. If you do not agree with this, delete all copies of the software and cease using it. You are free to use FatWare at no charge for personal, non-commercial use. For commercial use, a registration fee of $10 is required. Registration fees may be mailed to: Russ Woodroofe 1449 Morehead Ann Arbor, MI, 48103 Distribution of FatWaste is freely permitted, as long as both files (README.TXT and FATWASTE.EXE) are included. This software is provided "as is", and with no warranty of any kind. USING FATWASTE -------------- To use FatWaste, at a command prompt type "\fatwaste". Fatwaste will print space waste information for the current partition. For example, if one types 'fatwaste' at a C:\> prompt, information will be returned for the C: drive. If one types 'fatwaste' at a D:\TEMP> prompt, similarly, information will be returned for the D: drive. For more information on interpreting the output, keep reading. BACKGROUND ---------- The FAT filesystem allocates space for files in chunks of a certain size. This size varies with the size of the FAT partition, as follows: Partition Size | Allocation unit size -------------------------------------- 128-256 MB | 4k 256-512 MB | 8k 512-1024 MB | 16k 1024-2048 MB | 32k What this means, among other things, is that if you are using a FAT volume, a 1k file will take at least the allocation unit size. So, for example, on a 1.2 gig drive, a 1k file will take up 32k of disk space, but on an 850 meg drive, it would only take 16k of disk space (assuming in both cases that the drive is formatted with one, uncompressed FAT partition). FatWaste will find the length of all the files on your file system, and print a table of how much space would be wasted in this manner on volumes with various allocation unit sizes. If the file system is actually running uncompressed FAT, then FatWaste will also place an asterisk next to the line corresponding with the actual allocation unit size. Thus, by running FatWaste, one can, for example, gather information helpful for deciding whether to divide a large hard disk into 2 partitions. FatWaste only finds space wasted by large allocation units. There are other aspects of overhead involved in maintaining a filesystem which FatWaste does not gather statistics on. SAVING SPACE ------------ There are several ways to avoid wasting space like this. One approach which may be helpful is dividing a large hard disk into multiple partitions. For example, one might divide a 1.2 gig hard drive into a 1 gig partition and a 200 meg partition, or into two 512 meg partitions and one 200 meg partition. Another approach is to avoid keeping lots of small files, or to keep them on drives with smaller allocation units. For example, if one divided a 1.2 gig drive into partions of 1 gig and 200 megs, it would be better to put the very small files on the 200 meg partition, since the average space wasted per file will be much smaller. A more effective approach is to compress one's FAT partitions. Compressed FAT partitions avoid this problem with wasted space. Unfortunately, one pays a considerable performance price for turning on compression. If performance remains important, it might be worthwhile to look into DriveSpace 3 (provided with Microsoft Plus!), which allows one to adjust the level of compression to balance performance and space. The most effective approach is to throw out FAT altogether and run Windows NT, converting all FAT partitions to NTFS. NTFS does not waste space in this manner, and has many other high performance features that may make it worthwhile to use. Unfortunately, Windows 95 cannot read it, and support for NTFS is other operating systems such as Linux is not as good as that for FAT. CONTACT INFORMATION ------------------- As stated under Licensing, my snail mail address is Russ Woodroofe 1449 Morehead Ann Arbor, MI, 48103 I can be emailed at either paranoia@engin.umich.edu or power@cyberspace.org. The former is likely to be more reliable until I graduate from The University of Michigan, where I am currently an undergraduate.