What is the difference between “Size” and “Size on disk?”
In: Technology
this comes from the hard-drive storage paradigm. the disk is not a bucket, it is broken in small sections of equal size, for optimization reasons.
you know your ice tray? that’s how a storage drive works. many sections of the same size. you have a cup of water that will fill 3 and a half ice “units”. the one that you used up to the half can’t be used to store another file, so it will be reported as 4 units (size on disk) even if the space you need is 3.5 units (size).
in filesystems you can’t use half (or a third) of an allocation unit. if the file you want to store has a size of bits that can’t fit exactly over a number of sectors you will get a size on disk that is slightly different from size.
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