 Kirk Lawler |
digital file storage I recently purchased a Maxtor remote hard drive to back up my digital photo files. After transferring a number of folders I noticed that they take up a lot less room on the Maxtor than on my PC, apparently because Maxtor uses the FAT32 storage system. Is there any possibility that FAT32 will degrade my images, as it appears to be compressing them? Thanks.
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Brendan Knell |
If it is compressing them, then I would imagine that it would degrade them a little bit. It would be like using a higher compressed JPEG. I don't think that it would degrade them very much, unless you were planning on really blowing them up, or doing tons of editing. Also, about how much less space are they taking up?
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robert G. Fately |
I think you are confusing two different things here - file size compared between the two disks and compression. First - short answer - no, there is no possibility that your images were degraded due to "compression". That is, unless you alter their file formats (from TIFF to JPEG, for example) the image files are actually untouched and identical. Longer answer - the reason that the files seem to take up less space on one drive compared to the other probably has to do with something a bit more geeky regarding the drives - sector size. While mere mortals don't realize this, the fact is that a disk drive is subdivided into a certain number of sectors and blocks. One of the jobs an operating system has is to keep track of where stuff is stored and where to find it, etc., using he addresses of these blocks and sectors. None of that is particularly important - it is, after all, invisible to all but the geekiest among us - except for one bit of strangeness. There is an upper limit as to how many sectors into which a drive can be broken up, and above a certain hard drive size (I forget the specific numbers) what happens is basically that each block just becomes bigger. That is to say, on a 20MB drive each block might be 2KB in size, and on a 120GB drive each block could be 8KB in size. The deal is that a single block can only contain the data from a single file. A sigle file may require mutliple blocks, but if there's any "free space" in the last block then it goes unused. The upshot of this is that a given file might take more apparent space on one drive than another. To use my simplistic example above, imagine an image file that takes 9KB of space. On the 20MB drive, that would require a total of 5 blocks, or 10KB of disk space. On the 120GB drive, though, it would need one full 8KB block plus 1KB of a second block to store - so from the drive's point of view this file is suddenly 16KB large. Understand - there is abosolutely zero difference between the two files - they are completely identical - the different sizes reported have only to do with the mechanics of how the hard disk drives operate under the covers. Hope that helps...
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Justin G. |
Wow didn't know this Bob. Very interesting. Learn something every day.
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Christopher A. Vedros |
Just a fellow geek here chiming in that Bob is absolutely correct. Geeks rule! Chris
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