Date: Thu, 11 Sep 1997 17:05:06 +0300 (IDT)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: Paul Derbyshire <ao950 AT FreeNet DOT Carleton DOT CA>
cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: The is world dropping MS-DOS. What about DJGPP? (Was Re: Quake
In-Reply-To: <5ute02$9ah@freenet-news.carleton.ca>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.970911165851.13452D-100000@is>
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On 7 Sep 1997, Paul Derbyshire wrote:

> FAT serves a becessary function, tracking which disk blocks are free and
> which are not. It uses a bit for every block on a disk. As far as I
> understand it, the only real problem is it takes up a fair bit of space.
> On the other hand I can't think what the alternative could be.

One alternative is the Unix-style inode filesystem, where in essence the
table of used blocks for each file grows as the file size grows.  Any 
book on Unix will describe the details of this.

NTFS and HPFS (from NT and OS/2, respectively) are other alternatives.

AFAIK, none of these waste more than 511 bytes for any given file. 

However, many people think that FAT systems also *must* be slower than 
the other types, which IMHO is plain wrong.  The speed depends on how the 
OS parts which deal with files were written, and how smart is the disk 
cache.