Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Your PC Is Stealing Space From You”.
Computer storage feels like a rip-off, considering you never get quite as much space as it says on the box. The part of the reason for this is something called over provisioning, but we’re not going to talk about that today, not because we’re mean, but because we already did a video on it. But what we are going to talk about today is another sneaky way that your own drives. The ones in your computer. Right now steal space from you. If you bring up the properties box for any random file on Windows, you’ll see a stat called size on disk and odds. Are that it’ll be larger than the field that says size? This means basically what it shows most files take up more space than they really need to occupy, but why? The answer has to do with how your computer’s file system stores data, if you’re using Windows, it’s NTFS file system, organizes all of its data into four kilobyte clusters by default.
Aside from making your drive delightfully crunchy discrete clusters, like these serve the important purpose of making it simpler for your system to keep track of where everything is, in other words, having consistent cluster size, reduces the over overhead of your file system. The downside of this is what we call slack space in this case. If a file isn’t an exact multiple of four kilobytes in size, you’re going to have some wasted space or slack, you can see this very easily with small Microsoft Word documents, many of which take up 16 kilobytes on your disk, even though the real size might be A few kilobytes less a few kilobytes of wasted space here and there might not seem like that big a deal, but given how many small files are on the typical SSD, it really starts to add up, not to mention that many of these small files are system Files that Windows needs to run, so it’s not like you can just get rid of them, but the good news here is that slack space is unlikely to have a massive effect on your drive unless you are really hurting for those last two megabytes and that four Kilobytes is a relatively small cluster size compared to other file systems such as one commonly found on USB flash drives, but with flash drives being smaller than the typical SSD, why the heck do they have bigger cluster sizes and more wasted space? We’Ll tell you right after our sponsor hi, it’s me Anthony, we’ll tell you more right after we thank PNY for sponsoring this video get equipped for Stellar gaming and creating with pny’s Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 TI experience fast, Ray tracing AI accelerated performance with DLS S3 new Ways to create and much more featuring electrifying epic X, RGB lighting for the ultimate controllable lighting experience with endless argb lighting possibilities.
I mean you can have a Powerhouse of a PC and look good doing it. Upgrade your gaming setup with the PNY XLR8 4070 TI GPU, using the link below, although flash drives, can use a variety of file systems really any file system. Xfat is popular among modern devices despite it having a name that makes it sound more like the next trendy diet.
Unlike NTFS, xflat has clusters of between 32 and 128 kilobytes, although you might immediately think that that would result in more slack space, and you would be right, there are some real benefits to arranging the files. This way, like other file systems, XP fat, has to keep track of which clusters are free and which are used, and this information also takes up space on the drive. So fewer larger clusters means a smaller cluster record as far as the concern about more slack space. It’S less of a space hog if you only have a relatively small number of large files, which is exactly what many kinds of flash drives are used for, such as the SD cards and cameras that store high resolution images. Xfat also differs from NTFS in that it doesn’t keep a journal. Basically, that’s a log of changes that helps the file system recover in the event of a crash. Journaling takes up precious space, so expat doesn’t bother with it. Instead.
Expat uses large clusters so that, if there’s some kind of unexpected failure, such as yanking the drive out of the USB port, while it’s busy chances are a smaller number of clusters overall will be affected. I guess the moral of today’s story is that no, the computer storage industry isn’t out to rip you off in the way that you think it is, though I still wouldn’t blow 40 bucks on an SSD water block. I can’t believe those exist thanks for watching guys like dislike check out some of our other videos comment with video suggestions down below and don’t forget to subscribe and follow. .