Free Space Management (cont.)
Link List.
- Keeping a pointer to the first free block in a special location on the disk.
- Each free block contains a pointer to the next free block.
- Allocating one block is relatively ok.
- Allocating several blocks is expensive (disk movements).
FAT (MS/DOS, OS/2):
- Improved variation of the link list.
- In the FAT file system method, the free space is managed as one file.