With the release of OS 8.1 Apple changed the way hard drives
are formatted to accept data. Apple greatly increased the
number of potential allocation blocks changing from HFS to
HFS+ under 8.1. This means that far less space on the hard
drive is wasted on small files. Depending on the number and
size of the files on your hard drive and the size of your
hard drive you may recoup sizable amounts of space by formatting
to the new standard. These tests were run on a PowerMac 9500
in a 1.4GB partition with 9,385 files using 829MB of space.
It reflects a drive under heavy use with many small files.
The data was obtained using MacSlack a freeware utility that
lets you quickly asses how much space you would save given
a smaller allocation block than you are currently using.
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