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From: peprbv AT cfa0 DOT harvard DOT edu (Bob Babcock)
Subject: Re: Lots of small files in DJGPP waste space & should be chained up!
Sender: news AT cfanews DOT harvard DOT edu
Reply-To: rbabcock AT cfa DOT harvard DOT edu
Organization: Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge, MA, USA
References: <DG2uM1 DOT 5rz AT jade DOT mv DOT net>
Date: Sun, 8 Oct 1995 05:58:27 GMT
Lines: 15
To: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Dj-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp

A.Appleyard (A DOT APPLEYARD AT fs2 DOT mt DOT umist DOT ac DOT uk) wrote:
: my department has just got 9 new Pentiums whose hard disk clusters are
: 32K bytes each!!  [and many small djgpp file waste space]

You're going to have this problem with all files, not just djgpp files.
A friend discovered that he was wasting 400MB of his 1GB disk in cluster
overhead.  I know of only two possible solutions: (1) break the disk up
into multiple partitions or (2) format the disk as HPFS which uses 512 byte
allocation units regardless of the disk size.  Option (2) requires OS/2,
but that's not a bad environment for running djgpp.

Actually, there may be a 3rd option: disk compression software may effectively
lower the cluster size.  My Stacker manual mentions the possibility of
changing the cluster size, but is rather vague about how Stacker handles
this problem.