One of the most important things that an operating system does is to manage the use of
disks and other storage media. (After all, DOS does stand for Disk Operating
System). The key question is: given that we have a disk that can store a certain amount of
information, and a bunch of files and directories (of varying sizes and descriptions) that
need to use this space, how do we organize and manage it efficiently?
Various operating systems have come up with different ways of managing the organization
and allocation of disk space to files. This section describes how the FAT file system
allocates space to files and manages the use of each disk volume.
Next: Clusters (Allocation Units)
