On Mon, 26 Aug 2002, Michael JasonSmith wrote: > For the Newbies. > A "block" is the basic unit of storage on a disk. No matter how > small a file is, it will take up at least one block. This would be <snip>
It's even more complicated than this. Filesystems also store information about files in a separate place, usually called an inode. An inode will store stuff like which blocks on the disk are used by the file, file read/write permissions, and other stuff (but not usually the file name, which is stored elsewhere...so you can have a file with multiple names). Some filesystems (for example, NTFS) store the file contents (for small files) in the inode. ReiserFS stores a log of what file system operations have happened recently (saves and file creations). It stores small files in the log, which means that small files can actually take up 0 blocks. tim http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~tnw13 Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
