Waste of space? Maybe. NetApp uses 4K blocks so if you have lots of really small files <4K then you'll waste quite a bit of space.
Supak
All files potentially waste space, regardless of size. With a block size of 4k, you can expect each file to waste an average of 2k. A 17k file uses 5 blocks (20k) of which 3k is wasted. A 15k file uses 4 blocks (16k) of which 1k is wasted. So the amount of storage wasted is roughly the number of files multiplied by 2k bytes. Divide this by the total disk space used to get the percentage of space wasted. I just checked one of our volumes that contains user home directories. It has 3680867 files and 146203264K used, which means about 5% is wasted.
Steve Losen scl@virginia.edu phone: 804-924-0640
University of Virginia ITC Unix Support