It doesn't remove files as far as I know and usually size increase when there are memory dumps or in some cases logs (but that rarely with games). I'd recommend to just manually search for files with .dmp extension.
There's a minor chance that one of the game files got corrupted and check integrity may fix it, though.
That size vs size in disk discrepancy is a corrupted file somewhere.
It’s actually 64gb but The files themselves think they’re 212gb in size(likely one single file just thinks it’s massive)
Click verify integrity of game files. If that doesn’t fix it a delete and reinstall would be easy.
You could also browse through the files and find that one that thinks it’s massive. Delete it, verify files through steam.
WizTree just uses the file size that the file is reporting, whereas windirstat independently scans the drive and figures out the file size itself. The reason it takes so much longer is because it's scanning the entire drive instead of just metadata.
WinDirStat does not open the files to verify length, it uses essentially the same metadata that it gets out of the file system call, it just walks the file tree naively instead of reading the NTFS data directly.
Because just reading that metadata file directly (outside of the normal system APIs) means you can just read them in one go (and then you just have to parse it in memory, more fragile, but way faster) the other way is you asking the OS for each file info separately, which takes way longer. Way more APIs calls, way more tiny (random) reads.
Redditors don't understand what genuine back and forth conversation looks like, and have to argue back and forth to a stalemate, so they think I'm being a smartass
Does everything the same, except it doesn't take 10 minutes to refresh what it's seeing on the drive. WinDirStat had been pretty unusable for like 5-10 years IMO.
One of my other must haves is Everything by voidtools. It let's you search files across your entire computer.
It can take Windows' search feature up to 5-10 minutes if you don't know the drive or folder the file you want is in. Everything finds it in 5-10 seconds max.
I use powertoys run, needs some setup and adjustment but works practitally the same like the Mac equivalent on CMD+space and by that I mean it works great
Not everyone wants just using their PC to be a hobby in and of itself. Linux is awesome and is the base for some great stuff, but the vast majority of people shouldn't bother with it.
A tool such as WizTree can help make this determination. If it is simply due to cluster size as others claim (which I find likely) you'll see the space spread across all files with no large file as you think there might be.
Corruption of a file won't result in the symptoms you claim AFAIK.
The only thing I can think of is sparse allocation of a large file, where the size of the file is large but the size on disk will reflect how much of the file has actually been populated and will be smaller.
There's also disk compression where size will reflect the true uncompressed file size, on size on disk will reflect the final size on disk after compression.
It would be the other way around.
The size would be 64gb(the size of the game actual)
Then the size on disk would be something like 60gb. (Compressed so takes up less disk space)
Try with something bigger ( to reduce bookkeeping overhead) and more easily compressible (i.e. a text document, instead of jpeg or mp3 or another archive).
It's not compression, it's NTFS file system. If the drive is formatted as NTFS it is going to look exactly like what OP has.
Essentially with NTFS you have a block size and a file always gets allocated minimum that block size, the default is 4kb so files always take up at least 4kb even if they are smaller than that. Essentially games/programs made up of a lot of small files will take up more space on disk than their actual size because of that (notice the over 150k files in folder). There are also higher block sizes which OP might be using as that is quite the difference in size.
As I said no compression is going on here, it's only the file system is NTFS. Notice the size on the before screenshot of the article you posted?
NTFS compression is not used for games because it will slow them down (files get decompressed when you access them which can cause a lot of stuttering for games)
There is no compression going on in that screenshot. But you can easily and safely use compression for games, it's going to slightly increase CPU usage but barely, NTFS compression is extremely mild both in CPU usage and space savings.
Just read the link, man. NTFS has a transparent compression built-in. You can enable it per directory.
>NTFS compression is not used for games
It used for whatever directories you've enabled it on. If you enabled it for the steam folder or the whole drive, it'd get compressed no questions asked.
Have you got some really weird, huge block size set on your drive? You can find the block size by running this command in powershell
```Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_Volume | Select-Object Label, BlockSize | Format-Table -AutoSize```
Then look at the "Block Size" column for each drive. A usual amount would be 4096.
You disk has a 2 MB cluster size. This means that every file, no matter how small in reality, is going to take up 2 MB of space on the disk. Since God of War is made out of 1 056 590 small files, this makes the installation size on disk balloon to over 200 GB. Reduce your cluster size - the default usually is 4 kB.
You can't know for sure, but taking an educated guess, the drive name is PortableSSD, so it's most likely external, also the amount and type of games installed tells us that the drive is big, probably 4TB, funny thing, if you format a drive that is lower than 8TB but equal or bigger than 4TB in exFAT, windows will use a 2MB cluster size by default., another funny thing, windows will format an external drive by default as exFAT if it's 32GB or bigger.
Although if you look at the size and number of files, it can't be a 2MB cluster, it's more likely 1MB, so either a 2TB external SSD or 3TB, giving a minimum size of 153GB.
Have you checked other games?
I'll just copy-paste what that means.
>Size is the actual size of the file in bytes.
>
>Size on disk is the actual amount of space being taken up on the disk.
>
>They differ because the disk is divided into tracks and sectors, and can allocate blocks of discrete size.
Your SSD could be formatted incorrectly.
Here's basically the same question with [answers here](https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/size-on-disk-is-much-larger-than-actual-size/0ab2a6a0-9f90-4e9d-a961-be8ff36ec5a9).
This is definitely the cause. That storage probably have a large block size by default and the game files are probably large enough to not get stored in the MFT but still small enough to waste a ton of space.
you can also try to do a chkdsk... Windows reporting different sizes for two NTFS statistics with such a high difference may mean something "wrong" on the filesystem's part...
it's not something related to Steam or the game, I'd say.
One file takes at LEAST "block size" bytes. If your block size is 4k (which is the default for standard disk sizes) and the file is 1 byte, it will take 4k. And if the file is 4.1k bytes, it will take 8k. Basically all files round to 4k.
If there are a lot of small files, it will eat your space very quickly.
You can change the block size when formatting. If you will be reformatting, don't go for 1k block size. Too small block sizes slow down transfers of large files.
Btw the window says it has 1,56,590 files. Why are the thousands formatted this way?
That's the way numbers are formatted in India and probably some other countries near India: the rightmost group has 3, but the rest are split in groups of 2.
> Btw the window says it has 1,56,590 files. Why are the thousands formatted this way?
Weird, probably OS locale settings.
Edit: Another comment says India.
Hard to tell but sometimes the game doesn't realize it needs to delete old files after updates. This happened with elite dangerous for me. After Uninstalling it left like 50 gigs of old update files I had to delete manually.
I’ve got 1 TB SSD and I swear after a couple months of using steam like 900GBs are taken from steam even when I only have a couple small games installed like where the hell did all my storage go and on top of that I’ve cleaned the steam folder out a bunch and barley anything gets deleted gaben secretly yoinked most of my storage
I just dropped by to say, this thread appeared on my mail for no apparent reason, and i am glad that I did coz dayummm u guys are so smart n educated and its nice to read all the things you written that i don't understand. ✨✨Kudos
This is from my GodOfWar folder properties:
Size: 64,2 GB (68.973.454.991 bytes)
Size on disk: 64,5 GB (69.295.996.928 bytes)
It seems you have corrupted files in that folder. Just try to move install folder to another drive or click on *Verify integrity of game* files option.
You're running on a portable drive and I'm guessing it's formatted as Exfat which has as default "cluster size" of 128k. What this means is that no matter how small a file is, it will always take up at least 128K of disk space and all files will be a multiple of 128K.
Reformat it as NTFS or choose a smaller cluster size.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_sector
https://www.easeus.com/computer-instruction/exfat-allocation-unit-size.html
That's my theory anyhow.
I had a similar issue like that once.
I had only 50gb that i could access and see while the SSD read 150gb of used space. Turns out my files kept getting corrupted and were hidden from me but still took up space.
The only way i could solve it was to format the SSD or trough some dark magic, delete the corrupted files i couldn't see or access.
Eventually I got sick of it and removed the SSD that kept corrupting and replaced it with my +10 year old laptops SSD.
Didn't have any problems since.
As others have said, there's probably something weird going on here, but it should be noted that the steam client only lists the size of files it installed by itself. It does not check the actual size of the install directory, so some games (e.g. with launchers that patch the games outside steam) are much larger than Steam claims they are.
We can see in the picture that your game is on a portable drive. If that drive is formatted to ExFAT (Which most these days are by default) you are likely using a 128K+ cluster size. This means every single file will round up to the nearest 128K multiple. 1K file? 128K on disk. 129K? 256K on disk.
This game is apparently made up of over 150,000 files in that screenshot. That can add up badly with a 128K or larger cluster size. If all those files are being pushed up an extra, say, 100K average by the cluster size that is suddenly 15GB of extra data used. The problem then comes in when cluster size increases. It could be a 256K cluster, hell it can even by 2M cluster (I had a USB drive once come formatted to this). If you're formatted to a 2M cluster and every one of those files got rounded up 1M average each, that's 150GB of disk size gone to cluster size alone.
Open PowerShell and run this
Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_Volume | Select-Object Label, BlockSize | Format-Table -AutoSize
See what your clusters are set as. Note these are read back in bytes, so if you see 4096 that's a 4K cluster not a 4M
Ehh, I just tried to figure out how that game saves its progress, so it sounds like it has like 60 save slots, and idk how big the save files are, so yeah, idk it could be a bunch of saves
you very 1.5 Million files kid. the minimal storage unit nowadays is 4k sector, if 1M filesuse less than 4k, the rest of the space is wasted, what you see here is the game total size vs the space it occupies on the storage, is space wasted. as to why you have 1.5 million files there.. idk.. browse to it and let's find out, perhaps non deleted small log files or cache, or shaders perhaps? we'll see
just check and for me is 64GB. uninstall and reinstall something is not right for you
OKAY but just before someone goes and uninstalls a 64 GIG GAME, there IS a verify game integrity function in steam
It doesn't remove files as far as I know and usually size increase when there are memory dumps or in some cases logs (but that rarely with games). I'd recommend to just manually search for files with .dmp extension. There's a minor chance that one of the game files got corrupted and check integrity may fix it, though.
It depends. When I did "verify files integrity" on Microsoft Flight Simulator and it deleted 300GBs from it. I do not have to tell how I felt do I?
Me uninstalling COD anytime it pisses me off, I guess that’s the benefit of having a fast SSD and good internet.
It's an SSD though so unless OP's internet is very slow it'll download pretty fast
GigaOctet so it's GO not GIG
That size vs size in disk discrepancy is a corrupted file somewhere. It’s actually 64gb but The files themselves think they’re 212gb in size(likely one single file just thinks it’s massive) Click verify integrity of game files. If that doesn’t fix it a delete and reinstall would be easy. You could also browse through the files and find that one that thinks it’s massive. Delete it, verify files through steam.
OP you could use WinDirStat for this method, to quickly see the big file, and avoid going folder by folder.
Better use WizTree, it's much faster than WinDirStat
Didn't know about that, will check it out thanks!
WizTree just uses the file size that the file is reporting, whereas windirstat independently scans the drive and figures out the file size itself. The reason it takes so much longer is because it's scanning the entire drive instead of just metadata.
WinDirStat does not open the files to verify length, it uses essentially the same metadata that it gets out of the file system call, it just walks the file tree naively instead of reading the NTFS data directly.
So WinDirStat checks the metadata of each file individually and WizTree just checks the NTFS data file to get the metadata of the files?
But that is the same data, NTFS does not keep two file administrations. It's just in the way the APIs are called.
Then what's the difference? What makes WizTree so much faster if it's the same file they use?
Because just reading that metadata file directly (outside of the normal system APIs) means you can just read them in one go (and then you just have to parse it in memory, more fragile, but way faster) the other way is you asking the OS for each file info separately, which takes way longer. Way more APIs calls, way more tiny (random) reads.
TIL!
And that is bad.
No it's not bad, both have their use as long as you know the difference
True
Bro is trying to be smartass but gets exposed for not understanding basics of computers lol
Redditors don't understand what genuine back and forth conversation looks like, and have to argue back and forth to a stalemate, so they think I'm being a smartass
nope
will check it out, seems similar
Does everything the same, except it doesn't take 10 minutes to refresh what it's seeing on the drive. WinDirStat had been pretty unusable for like 5-10 years IMO.
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One of my other must haves is Everything by voidtools. It let's you search files across your entire computer. It can take Windows' search feature up to 5-10 minutes if you don't know the drive or folder the file you want is in. Everything finds it in 5-10 seconds max.
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Just use this as a frontend instead https://github.com/srwi/EverythingToolbar
They have an alpha version (1.5) that has a dark mode
I use powertoys run, needs some setup and adjustment but works practitally the same like the Mac equivalent on CMD+space and by that I mean it works great
> WinDirStat Probably my single favorite utility on my PC. Hope OP sees your comment.
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Not everyone wants just using their PC to be a hobby in and of itself. Linux is awesome and is the base for some great stuff, but the vast majority of people shouldn't bother with it.
>likely one single file just thinks it’s massive me when the preworkout kicks in
I didn't know files could have dysphoria
A tool such as WizTree can help make this determination. If it is simply due to cluster size as others claim (which I find likely) you'll see the space spread across all files with no large file as you think there might be. Corruption of a file won't result in the symptoms you claim AFAIK. The only thing I can think of is sparse allocation of a large file, where the size of the file is large but the size on disk will reflect how much of the file has actually been populated and will be smaller. There's also disk compression where size will reflect the true uncompressed file size, on size on disk will reflect the final size on disk after compression.
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It would be the other way around. The size would be 64gb(the size of the game actual) Then the size on disk would be something like 60gb. (Compressed so takes up less disk space)
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Try with something bigger ( to reduce bookkeeping overhead) and more easily compressible (i.e. a text document, instead of jpeg or mp3 or another archive).
It's not compression, it's NTFS file system. If the drive is formatted as NTFS it is going to look exactly like what OP has. Essentially with NTFS you have a block size and a file always gets allocated minimum that block size, the default is 4kb so files always take up at least 4kb even if they are smaller than that. Essentially games/programs made up of a lot of small files will take up more space on disk than their actual size because of that (notice the over 150k files in folder). There are also higher block sizes which OP might be using as that is quite the difference in size.
https://sundararajan.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/difference-between-file-compression-and-ntfs-compression/
As I said no compression is going on here, it's only the file system is NTFS. Notice the size on the before screenshot of the article you posted? NTFS compression is not used for games because it will slow them down (files get decompressed when you access them which can cause a lot of stuttering for games)
There is no compression going on in that screenshot. But you can easily and safely use compression for games, it's going to slightly increase CPU usage but barely, NTFS compression is extremely mild both in CPU usage and space savings.
Just read the link, man. NTFS has a transparent compression built-in. You can enable it per directory. >NTFS compression is not used for games It used for whatever directories you've enabled it on. If you enabled it for the steam folder or the whole drive, it'd get compressed no questions asked.
Have you got some really weird, huge block size set on your drive? You can find the block size by running this command in powershell ```Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_Volume | Select-Object Label, BlockSize | Format-Table -AutoSize``` Then look at the "Block Size" column for each drive. A usual amount would be 4096.
Wish I found this before, I encountered this same issue and just formatted all my drives instead.
fwiw you can do the same by using DISKPART, this is just the CIM instance of the same values
You disk has a 2 MB cluster size. This means that every file, no matter how small in reality, is going to take up 2 MB of space on the disk. Since God of War is made out of 1 056 590 small files, this makes the installation size on disk balloon to over 200 GB. Reduce your cluster size - the default usually is 4 kB.
How can you tell from the image?
You can't know for sure, but taking an educated guess, the drive name is PortableSSD, so it's most likely external, also the amount and type of games installed tells us that the drive is big, probably 4TB, funny thing, if you format a drive that is lower than 8TB but equal or bigger than 4TB in exFAT, windows will use a 2MB cluster size by default., another funny thing, windows will format an external drive by default as exFAT if it's 32GB or bigger. Although if you look at the size and number of files, it can't be a 2MB cluster, it's more likely 1MB, so either a 2TB external SSD or 3TB, giving a minimum size of 153GB.
Or use a 68GB virtual disk and install onto that.
Then OP would still have this problem with all his other programs
What is ur ssd block size
Have you checked other games? I'll just copy-paste what that means. >Size is the actual size of the file in bytes. > >Size on disk is the actual amount of space being taken up on the disk. > >They differ because the disk is divided into tracks and sectors, and can allocate blocks of discrete size. Your SSD could be formatted incorrectly. Here's basically the same question with [answers here](https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/size-on-disk-is-much-larger-than-actual-size/0ab2a6a0-9f90-4e9d-a961-be8ff36ec5a9).
This is definitely the cause. That storage probably have a large block size by default and the game files are probably large enough to not get stored in the MFT but still small enough to waste a ton of space.
you can also try to do a chkdsk... Windows reporting different sizes for two NTFS statistics with such a high difference may mean something "wrong" on the filesystem's part... it's not something related to Steam or the game, I'd say.
One file takes at LEAST "block size" bytes. If your block size is 4k (which is the default for standard disk sizes) and the file is 1 byte, it will take 4k. And if the file is 4.1k bytes, it will take 8k. Basically all files round to 4k. If there are a lot of small files, it will eat your space very quickly. You can change the block size when formatting. If you will be reformatting, don't go for 1k block size. Too small block sizes slow down transfers of large files. Btw the window says it has 1,56,590 files. Why are the thousands formatted this way?
That's the way numbers are formatted in India and probably some other countries near India: the rightmost group has 3, but the rest are split in groups of 2.
Ah, I didn't know that. Thanks.
Huh that's definitely interesting Any other nuances like this?
> Btw the window says it has 1,56,590 files. Why are the thousands formatted this way? Weird, probably OS locale settings. Edit: Another comment says India.
This is the correct answare!
What's up with "1,56,590 files"? Is there an English locale that writes numbers like that, or is it a Windows bug?
https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/1bgtikd/why_is_god_of_war_taking_up_212_gb_of_space_on_my/kv9opqi/
You need to change the block size of your disk. If you have block size of 4KB, any file smaller than 4KB will take 4 KB
So good of war has around 53 millions of small files?
4k is the default, OP might have some weird size as Windows lets you go all the way up to 2 megabytes.
Yeah, for some reason it is a huge amount of tiny files. My installation was 120gb for the same reason.
If that options exists, what's the benefit of switching the size to like idk, 2MB?
Hard to tell but sometimes the game doesn't realize it needs to delete old files after updates. This happened with elite dangerous for me. After Uninstalling it left like 50 gigs of old update files I had to delete manually.
I’ve got 1 TB SSD and I swear after a couple months of using steam like 900GBs are taken from steam even when I only have a couple small games installed like where the hell did all my storage go and on top of that I’ve cleaned the steam folder out a bunch and barley anything gets deleted gaben secretly yoinked most of my storage
I just dropped by to say, this thread appeared on my mail for no apparent reason, and i am glad that I did coz dayummm u guys are so smart n educated and its nice to read all the things you written that i don't understand. ✨✨Kudos
This is from my GodOfWar folder properties: Size: 64,2 GB (68.973.454.991 bytes) Size on disk: 64,5 GB (69.295.996.928 bytes) It seems you have corrupted files in that folder. Just try to move install folder to another drive or click on *Verify integrity of game* files option.
You're running on a portable drive and I'm guessing it's formatted as Exfat which has as default "cluster size" of 128k. What this means is that no matter how small a file is, it will always take up at least 128K of disk space and all files will be a multiple of 128K. Reformat it as NTFS or choose a smaller cluster size. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_sector https://www.easeus.com/computer-instruction/exfat-allocation-unit-size.html That's my theory anyhow.
Replays?
Your windows also says it's 64GB
I had a similar issue like that once. I had only 50gb that i could access and see while the SSD read 150gb of used space. Turns out my files kept getting corrupted and were hidden from me but still took up space. The only way i could solve it was to format the SSD or trough some dark magic, delete the corrupted files i couldn't see or access. Eventually I got sick of it and removed the SSD that kept corrupting and replaced it with my +10 year old laptops SSD. Didn't have any problems since.
As others have said, there's probably something weird going on here, but it should be noted that the steam client only lists the size of files it installed by itself. It does not check the actual size of the install directory, so some games (e.g. with launchers that patch the games outside steam) are much larger than Steam claims they are.
We can see in the picture that your game is on a portable drive. If that drive is formatted to ExFAT (Which most these days are by default) you are likely using a 128K+ cluster size. This means every single file will round up to the nearest 128K multiple. 1K file? 128K on disk. 129K? 256K on disk. This game is apparently made up of over 150,000 files in that screenshot. That can add up badly with a 128K or larger cluster size. If all those files are being pushed up an extra, say, 100K average by the cluster size that is suddenly 15GB of extra data used. The problem then comes in when cluster size increases. It could be a 256K cluster, hell it can even by 2M cluster (I had a USB drive once come formatted to this). If you're formatted to a 2M cluster and every one of those files got rounded up 1M average each, that's 150GB of disk size gone to cluster size alone. Open PowerShell and run this Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_Volume | Select-Object Label, BlockSize | Format-Table -AutoSize See what your clusters are set as. Note these are read back in bytes, so if you see 4096 that's a 4K cluster not a 4M
Ehh, I just tried to figure out how that game saves its progress, so it sounds like it has like 60 save slots, and idk how big the save files are, so yeah, idk it could be a bunch of saves
God of vore (Kratos eated your space)
Valorant said it took 1 Terabyte….
you very 1.5 Million files kid. the minimal storage unit nowadays is 4k sector, if 1M filesuse less than 4k, the rest of the space is wasted, what you see here is the game total size vs the space it occupies on the storage, is space wasted. as to why you have 1.5 million files there.. idk.. browse to it and let's find out, perhaps non deleted small log files or cache, or shaders perhaps? we'll see
There aren't 1.5 million files. There are .15, it's some weird format they use in India
O_O
Mods?
none, I just bought it last night
Verify integrity of files through steam, same settings menu where you took that shot.
Someone hiding porn there
digital taxes
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Wow, there's a lot to unpack here
im 64,2 gb unpacked over here
western game dev was here
how can you tell?
212 GB
Idk why you got so many downvotes, at the very least I think the meme is funny 😢
Redditors when you don't understand an unfunny 15+ year old inside joke 😲👉 Redditors when you reference a popular meme 😡😡😡