I was looking at hard drive space and my file allocation table today and thought since we're all using computers, and computers are a part of digital imageing, and digital imaging is a part of photography then this may be relevant (and possibly useful info ;). I have a Windows 98 box for *most* of my main computing and from time to time I run a little low on space before I copy the bigger files off to another drive, but I decided to see how much free space I could gain if I cleared off the *little* files. What got me going on this was an awareness that FAT32, the particular file allocation table (FAT) structure win98 uses has some features which waste space. you see, each cluster on a hard drive formatted to fat 32 can contain only *one* file. A table at the beginning of a drive records where each file is, or if a file is bigger than 32kb, which clusters the file is spread across. from the microsoft site: "The maximum possible number of clusters on a volume using the FAT32 file system is 268,435,445. With a maximum of 32 KB per cluster with space for the file allocation table (FAT), this equates to a maximum disk size of approximately 8 terabytes (TB). " so what is the problem? well a 1kb file is going to put on your hard drive and it will occupy 32kb of space. Not an issue if your PC never chats to the internet, but unfortunately, the net has a habit of scattering all manner of dribble across a computer, not all of which is cleared out even when you ask a computer to clear it. I thought I'd do a quick check to see how much space I was wasting and so did a search for those horrid 1 x 1 pixel gifs we know as web bugs, starting the search for *.gif 'at most' 1kb in size I found 2261 of them. that's 72 mb of hard drive real estate being hogged by a mere 2Mb of data! 70 mb wasted! I continued my search and found 168 jpegs under 1kb and 2625 text files (search *.txt) under 1mb then I did a search in temporary internet folder in windows AFTER clearing it using the tool provided and the search maxed out at 10,000, most of them Ca(xxxxxx) files which contained little or nothing at all so I searched for them (search Ca*) and came up with 10,000 (the quantity limit of my search) so they got deleted and I searched again another 10,000 ..and another 10,000* delete another 10,000 9632 remaining.. delete them searched some more and found a whole raft of files named in brackets like this [46] so I searched for [*.* 3108 files (deleted) find another 900 by searching C: search C: *.gif under 1kb (another 275) 2010 cookies under 1kb deleted.. how much space have I freed? well I've deleted over 61,000 files that were a mere 61 mb of 'data' but which occupied almost 2Gb of space on my hard drive! And none of those files were critical in any way, shape or form.. more on FAT32 - if you have a small hard drive, your clusters will be smaller, bigger drives = bigger clusters Cluster size Partition Size 2 KB < 260 MB 4 KB 260 MB - 8 GB 8 KB 8 GB - 16 GB 16 KB 16 GB - 32 GB 32 KB 32 GB< Apples using OSX as far as I can tell use a file allocation structure similar to FAT32 or the older windows equivalent FAT16 (with 16kb clusters) more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_File_System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table NTFS (windows 2000, XP and later) have a cluster size of 4kb, so a lot less is wasted when there is lots of small files. Of course the problem is not simply limited to teeny files but also files which creep slightly over the cluster size - a 33kb file will occupy the default 32kb cluster PLUS another cluster for the missing 1kb. a waste.. Solution? ZIP!~ :) Any files not used regularly can be shackled together and compressed, turning them into one big file and eliminating the wasted space - free tools for this include 7zip (which has very high compression rates and can write all manner of algorithms AND mac/unix users can use it) from www.7zip.org and if you find it's images you're zipping but feel that will cause problems later when you want to view them, CDisplay <http://www.geocities.com/davidayton/CDisplay> which can view images while they are zipped, is free! (Loads JPEG, PNG and static GIF images which are automatically ordered and presented for viewing one at a time or two at a time. The images may be in a zip, rar, ace or tar archive file - no need to decompress before reading.) just doing a search now for files under 4kb is size "The number of files found exceeds the maximum allowed(10,000), please refine your search" sigh k
