macosdiskramdisk

Files take up more space on the disk

When viewing details of a file using Finder, different values are shown for how much space the file occupies. For example, a file takes up 28.8KB of RAM but, 33KB of the disk. Anyone know the explanation?

Solution

  • Disk space is allocated in blocks. Meaning, in multiples of a "block size".

    For example, on my system a 1 byte file is 4096 bytes on disk.

    That's 1 byte of content & 4095 bytes of unused space.