Wasted space
***************

The wasted space is the amount of space in clusters on your hard disk that are not entirely filled. This is the last (or only) block of a file.

The FAT32 file system may have very large cluster sizes, depending on the partition size:

.. list-table::
   :widths: 50 50
   :header-rows: 1

   * - Partition Size
     - Default Cluster Size
   * - 1 - 8GB
     - 4KB
   * - 8 - 16GB
     - 8KB
   * - 16 - 32GB
     - 16KB
   * - >32GB
     - 32KB

If you have a FAT32 with a size of ``32GB`` or more, a cluster size of ``32KB`` will be used on it.

If you store ``10 files`` of ``1KB`` on this partition, this would use ``10 * 32KB = 320KB`` of disk space, and ``320KB - 10KB = 310KB`` would be wasted.

Especially a huge number of small files significantly increases the amount of wasted space on FAT32 partitions.

To reduce the wasted space, you can format your hard disk with the NTFS file system (:ref:`notesonntfs`). It usually operates with a cluster size of 4KB and so stores small files more effective.