[OBORONA-SPAM] Re: ipod madness

[Gabriel Dragffy]

This could be due to "cluster slack" with the fat32 fs. You have probably 
formatted it with very small clusters of maybe 4k? This is well suited to 
text documents and relatively small files, but will be inefficient when using 
lots of large files (like mp3s). Best bet is to check what cluster size it is 
at the moment and adjust it to something like 64k if it isn't already there. 
I only know of one tool that can do this to drives without reformatting them 
in the process "Acronis Disc Director" or "Acronis Partition Expert".
In the worst case scenario you could be wasting 10-20% of space by using very 
wrong cluster sizes.
Has anyone noticed in wind**s when you look at a files properties it give you 
two sizes - the first is the size of the file and the second is the size it 
takes up on disc (with cluster slack taken into consideration). As it turns 
out the second figure is always almost larger.
I know that on Linux the ReiserFS doesn't suffer from this or XFS (I haven't 
research ext2/3 or JFS) and judging from what you're saying HPFS also avoids 
this problem.

Gabe

> i have finally been using only gtkpod to sync my ipod back and forth. i
> have discovered one odd issue: since reformatting to vfat i don't seem
> to have as much space left. the same amount of music (roughly 2,000
> songs) on the apple file system (using itunes) took less than 1/2 of my
> 20 gig ipod's space. now using vfat the same amount of songs (using
> gtkpod) takes over 3/4 of my space. is there something going on with
> either the format or gtkpod?
>