What's the Largest Possible File Size?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2018-05-06
·
749 words · ~3 min read
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one of our younger viewers you may not remember a time before a hundred and
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twenty Gigabyte hard drives were the bare minimum but others of you may
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actually recall the days where two gigs
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was an extravagant luxury these days
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though it isn't uncommon to see multi terabyte drives in even mid-range
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computers due to the exploding file sizes from ever more elaborate PC games
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and 4k movies I mean a single to our 4k
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film on blu-ray can take up around 45
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gigabytes of space which got us thinking
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exactly how big could one single file
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get is there a hard limit is it bound
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only by the capacity of your storage medium I mean could you theoretically
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sit there and watch every movie TV show
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and cat video ever made packed into one
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mp4 file provided you had a hard drive
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and bucket of popcorn large enough well
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as it turns out the answer is complicated
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there is actually a crucial limiting factor to
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file sizes your storage devices file
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system and you can learn more about that up here but simply put a file system is
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the scheme that your hard drive SSD or memory card uses to organize and keep
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track of your files and one thing that
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most modern file systems do is keep records of how large each file is both
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so that the user can manage his or her disk space and so the computer can keep
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track of how much space is being used in different physical parts of the drive
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these size values are stored as either a
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32-bit or a 64-bit value so older
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operating systems like Windows 98 often used 30 two-bit file systems fat32 was
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the most common on home pcs in the late 90s and actually still persists in some
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applications today but unfortunately
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the highest value you can express in 32
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bits is a little over 4.2 billion meaning that the file size limit on many
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desktop computers used to be four point two gigabytes which is less than a full
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single layer DVD so that clearly
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wouldn't cut it these days but ever
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since Windows XP Microsoft has switched over its home operating systems to the
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NTFS file system which supports 64-bit
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file sizes something that would have caused slowdowns due to file system
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overhead on older pcs so nowadays the
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theoretical limit for a single NTFS file
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is over 18 exabytes enough to hold
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400 million of those 4k movies that I
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mentioned earlier though good luck finding a drive that large and anyway as
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with many other theoretical maximums the
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real-life limit is actually smaller modern operating systems impose
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additional limits on file sizes with Windows 10 cutting you off at 17 and a
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half terabytes I mean that is still
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larger than any hard drive on the market at the time we shot this episode but
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years from now we may have to rethink
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file systems yet again if they figure out a way for us to dump our
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consciousness onto a 100x of a DNA
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