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Top Document: Win95 FAQ Part 11 of 14: Disk Compression Previous Document: 11.1. Why should I bother? (Actually it's not as dumb as you might think) Next Document: 11.3. How do I compress my whole hard drive? See reader questions & answers on this topic! - Help others by sharing your knowledge
DriveSpace 3, in particular, is helpful for drives > 1 GB, if you set
compression to "none". This is because DriveSpace will use a smaller
physical cluster size.
FAT file systems have a 65 thousand cluster limit (64 K, or 65 536
clusters); this means as the drive gets bigger, the cluster size gets
bigger too. On a 1 GB hard drive, the cluster size is 32 KB! That's a
lot of disk space wasted if your file is much smaller than 32 KB!
DriveSpace (and Stacker, and what-have-you) use their own file system
and emulate FAT, and they can compress the unused space in a cluster.
DriveSpace 3, in particular, will use no more than 512 bytes per
simulated cluster, if your file is smaller than this.
You can observe this by running DEFRAG on a compressed drive in Win95;
after the initial Defrag pass, it will de-fragment a second time,
showing the relative sizes of each cluster. Tightly compressed
clusters will appear shorter.
* 11.2.1. Does disk compression on > 1 GB drives work with FAT32 as
well?
Apparently not. MS describes FAT32 in KB article Q154997 and they
clearly state that disk compression does not work on it (Hey, Stac
Electronics: That's your cue! Get on it!) This probably has something
to do with FAT32 being almost completely different from original FAT
and VFAT; the root directory being a real FAT chain instead of a
couple of sectors, for example.
User Contributions:Top Document: Win95 FAQ Part 11 of 14: Disk Compression Previous Document: 11.1. Why should I bother? (Actually it's not as dumb as you might think) Next Document: 11.3. How do I compress my whole hard drive? Part1 - Part2 - Part3 - Part4 - Part5 - Part6 - Part7 - Part8 - Part9 - Part10 - Part11 - Part12 - Part13 - Part14 - Single Page [ Usenet FAQs | Web FAQs | Documents | RFC Index ] Send corrections/additions to the FAQ Maintainer: gordonf@intouch.bc.ca
Last Update March 27 2014 @ 02:12 PM
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