linked files is a linked list: in every block, it stores the location of the next block; we don’t store files contiguously. We simply store a part of the file in a block, and a pointer to wherever the next block where the file is located is.
this solves the contiguous allocation’s fragmentation problem.
problems
- massive seek time to get all the blocks for a given file: data scattered
- random access of files (“find the middle”) is hard: can’t easily jump to an arbitrary location; we had to read the file from the start