Internal and external fragmentation

filesystems disk fragmentation
wantobegeek picture wantobegeek · Jul 29, 2009 · Viewed 98.5k times · Source

Can anyone please tell me the difference between internal and external fragmentation while allocation of disk space for files?

Answer

Ankit Bhatia picture Ankit Bhatia · Jul 27, 2014

External fragmentation
Total memory space is enough to satisfy a request or to reside a process in it, but it is not contiguous so it can not be used.

External fragmentation

Internal fragmentation
Memory block assigned to process is bigger. Some portion of memory is left unused as it can not be used by another process.

Internal fragmentation

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