MAME-GETTER
commented
4 years ago I am going to disagree.
I omit the _Alternatives from my personal set but a quick count of the number of links I have is:
/media/fat/_Arcade/_Organized# find | wc -l
1423-s, --summarize display only a total for each argument
-h, --human-readable print sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G)
-L, --dereference dereference all symbolic links
To dereference a symbolic link means to follow the link to the target file rather than work with the link itself. When you dereference a symbolic link, you end up with a pointer to the file (the filename of the target file). The term no-dereference is a double negative: It means reference.
/media/fat/_Arcade/_Organized# du -sh -L *
13M _1 A-E
8.4M _1 F-K
8.0M _1 L-Q
11M _1 R-T
4.8M _1 U-Z
11M _2 Core
3.0M _3 Year
11M _4 Manufacturer
8.3M _5 Category
dukrous
After running the organizer I realized that my free disk space had dropped below 10GB free. It wasn't a large drop, but I didn't expect to go from double to single digits.
So I tried again with a fresh SD card (400GB Sandisk) with only cores and official MRAs (no MAME roms at all) and saw that after running the organizer, it was using up 416 MB of space even though the files are only a few bytes large.
The end result is that the _Organized folder ends up taking up twice the disk space of the cores folder (290 MB from fresh install) and is easily the largest folder by size of the _Arcade folder, consuming 59% of the footprint of _Arcade even though it only actually takes up 18% of the actual total file size.
This is because it's using symlinks in a filesystem that doesn't really support them. They're more like the old .lnk files from Windows. However, MiSTer configures its FAT drive as using 128K blocks, so no matter how large a file is it's going to use a multiple of 128K of disk space. So if your file is 129K large, it's using up 256K of space. On Windows computers this would usually be solved with a defrag, but I don't think that would be recommended on MiSTer.