Question 7969 – GATE 2017 [Set-2]

→ Contiguous Allocation:
Advantage:
i) Both sequential and direct access is possible.
ii) Extremely fast.
Disadvantage:
i) Suffers from both internal and external fragmentation.
ii) Increasing file size is difficult, because it depends on the availability of contiguous memory at a particular instance.
→ Linked list allocation:
Advantage:
i) Flexible in terms of size.
ii) Does not suffers from external fragmentation.
Disadvantage:
i) Allocation is slower.
ii) Does not support random or direct access.
iii) Pointers require some extra overhead.
→ Indexed allocation:
Advantage:
i) Support direct access, so provides fast access to the file blocks.
ii) No external fragmentation.
Disadvantage:
i) The pointer overhead for indexed allocation is greater than linked allocation.
ii) Inefficient in terms of memory utilization.