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one of our younger viewers you may not remember a time before a hundred and
twenty Gigabyte hard drives were the bare minimum but others of you may
actually recall the days where two gigs
was an extravagant luxury these days
though it isn't uncommon to see multi terabyte drives in even mid-range
computers due to the exploding file sizes from ever more elaborate PC games
and 4k movies I mean a single to our 4k
film on blu-ray can take up around 45
gigabytes of space which got us thinking
exactly how big could one single file
get is there a hard limit is it bound
only by the capacity of your storage medium I mean could you theoretically
sit there and watch every movie TV show
and cat video ever made packed into one
mp4 file provided you had a hard drive
and bucket of popcorn large enough well
as it turns out the answer is complicated
there is actually a crucial limiting factor to
file sizes your storage devices file
system and you can learn more about that up here but simply put a file system is
the scheme that your hard drive SSD or memory card uses to organize and keep
track of your files and one thing that
most modern file systems do is keep records of how large each file is both
so that the user can manage his or her disk space and so the computer can keep
track of how much space is being used in different physical parts of the drive
these size values are stored as either a
32-bit or a 64-bit value so older
operating systems like Windows 98 often used 30 two-bit file systems fat32 was
the most common on home pcs in the late 90s and actually still persists in some
applications today but unfortunately
the highest value you can express in 32
bits is a little over 4.2 billion meaning that the file size limit on many
desktop computers used to be four point two gigabytes which is less than a full
single layer DVD so that clearly
wouldn't cut it these days but ever
since Windows XP Microsoft has switched over its home operating systems to the
NTFS file system which supports 64-bit
file sizes something that would have caused slowdowns due to file system
overhead on older pcs so nowadays the
theoretical limit for a single NTFS file
is over 18 exabytes enough to hold
400 million of those 4k movies that I
mentioned earlier though good luck finding a drive that large and anyway as
with many other theoretical maximums the
real-life limit is actually smaller modern operating systems impose
additional limits on file sizes with Windows 10 cutting you off at 17 and a
half terabytes I mean that is still
larger than any hard drive on the market at the time we shot this episode but
years from now we may have to rethink
file systems yet again if they figure out a way for us to dump our
consciousness onto a 100x of a DNA
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