Gadgetory

thanks for watching tech quickie click the subscribe button then enable notifications with the Bell icon so you won't miss any future videos if you're one of our younger viewers you may not remember a time before a hundred and twenty gigabyte hard drives were the bare minimum but others of you may actually recall the days where two gigs was an extravagant luxury these days though it isn't uncommon to see multi terabyte drives in even mid-range computers due to the exploding file sizes from ever more elaborate PC games and 4k movies I mean a single to our 4k film on blu-ray can take up around 45 gigabytes of space which got us thinking exactly how big could one single file get is there a hard limit is it bound only by the capacity of your storage medium I mean could you theoretically sit there and watch every movie TV show and cat video ever made packed into one mp4 file provided you had a hard drive and bucket of popcorn large enough well as it turns out the answer is complicated there is actually a crucial limiting factor to file sizes your storage devices file system and you can learn more about that up here but simply put a file system is the scheme that your hard drive SSD or memory card uses to organize and keep track of your files and one thing that most modern file systems do is keep records of how large each file is both so that the user can manage his or her disk space and so the computer can keep track of how much space is being used in different physical parts of the drive these size values are stored as either a 32-bit or a 64-bit value so older operating systems like Windows 98 often used 30 two-bit file systems fat32 was the most common on home pcs in the late 90s and actually still persists in some applications today but unfortunately the highest value you can express in 32 bits is a little over 4.2 billion meaning that the file size limit on many desktop computers used to be four point two gigabytes which is less than a full single layer DVD so that clearly wouldn't cut it these days but ever since Windows XP Microsoft has switched over its home operating systems to the NTFS file system which supports 64-bit file sizes something that would have caused slowdowns due to file system overhead on older pcs so nowadays the theoretical limit for a single NTFS file is over 18 exabytes enough to hold 400 million of those 4k movies that I mentioned earlier though good luck finding a drive that large and anyway as with many other theoretical maximums the real-life limit is actually smaller modern operating systems impose additional limits on file sizes with Windows 10 cutting you off at 17 and a half terabytes I mean that is still larger than any hard drive on the market at the time we shot this episode but years from now we may have to rethink file systems yet again if they figure out a way for us to dump our consciousness onto a 100 exabyte DNA storage thing speaking of storage tunnel bear is the VPN that doesn't log your activity yes my friends they've got a top rated privacy policy and are basically freaking awesome for anyone with privacy concerns about their web browsing or who just wants to get around pesky geo restrictions on the internet content they want to enjoy and tunnel bear fur teams is actually pretty freakin sick for business use as well so whether it's working securely in the office or while traveling tattle bear takes all the benefits of tunnel bear witches simple setup and brings it to businesses you can painlessly add your whole team to the account giving you the ability to change update and manage users without any complicated interfaces or setup by a network admin and tunnel bear for teams comes with priority support so start your 7 day free trial at tunnel bear comm slash Linus we've got that linked below so thanks for watching guys like a video dislike a video do whatever you want just check out our other channels comment with suggestions and subscribe so you don't miss any videos just like this one