File Management

The number of logical units which fit into one physical block determines its packing, and has an impact on the amount of internal fragmentation (wasted space) that occurs. As a general rule, half a physical block, on average, is wasted for each file, and the larger the block sizes are, the more space is lost to internal fragmentation.

A directory is a file that contains a mapping of file names to the number of the data structure named inode that stores the rest of the file's metadata. For example, a directory could say that a file named helloworld.exe is mapped to inode number 3625763. This way, when a user accesses the helloworld.exe file from inside the directory, the OS will know where to find this file's content on disk (since the inode contains the addresses in the disk where the file resides.)