What is Contiguous Allocation?
In Contiguous Allocation this scheme, each file occupies a contiguous set of blocks on the disk.
Example: The file ‘mail’ in the following figure starts from the block 19 with length = 6 blocks. Therefore, it occupies 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 blocks.
Advantages of Contiguous Allocation:
- Both Sequential and Direct Accesses are supported by this.
- This is extremely fast since the number of seeks are minimal because of contiguous allocation of file blocks.
Disadvantages of Contiguous Allocation:
- This method suffers from both internal and external fragmentation. This makes it inefficient in terms of memory utilization.
- Increasing file size is difficult because it depends on the availability of contiguous memory at a particular instance.
