Wednesday, 27 September 2017

My SanDisk USB flash drive shows that 43GB is used when I just copied a 10GB folder after formatting



I recently bought a SanDisk 128GB USB flash drive.


And after formatting the USB flash drive in exFAT format, I copied a folder whose capacity is around 10GB. There are lots of small files in it, so it took some time.


However, when I see in the Windows Explorer after copying the folder, it says that around 43GB of the storage is occupied and now only 70GB of the storage is free to use.


What is happening and how should I deal with it? Is my USB flash drive physically broken?


It is still weird because when I copied a single file with 7 GB capacity, it showed the remaining capacity correctly at around 110 GB available..



Answer



You already answered your own question: There are lots of small files in it


Every file on an exFAT volume takes at least one blocksize. So a file of a single byte in size takes at least 4K - a size amplification of 1:4096. You are seing a size amplification of 4.3, which is very plausible with lots of small files.


You can check this hypothesis by packing the files with WinRAR and the zero compression settings, then copy this file to the USB stick.


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