Bought the game recently. Played the game for two days. Experienced a lot of the known disconnections from server mostly the ones that are already being addressed.
My more pressing concern is in the title. Installed as advertised but when I wanted to check my drives I saw my 2TB storage in the red. Checked the file size and the game was occupying nearly three to four times the size as indicated by Steam. Uninstalled it and freed up around 380GB of file space.
Found out the issue is common, but did not find a real solution other than clean install. Would rather know the source of the issue as I feel this is a symptom rather than a cause. If I just reinstall it could comeback. I don’t use my computer whenever I download and install. Simply put, my use of my computer (which is also for work etc.) is restricted by the game installation hence my hesitance given the problem might return.
Hi! The reason Darktide shows as using substantially more space on disk is due to how your computer stores data on your drive. Hard drives save data in fixed-size blocks, so even small files take up an entire block. Games like Darktide have thousands of small files, which add up and causes them to take more space on disk than their actual size.
This is likely because your drive has large cluster sizes (sometimes external drives or certain formats use 64 KB clusters). You may wish to look in to your cluster size and how to best optimise this.
I’ll try to look into this but just so you know I also had both Warzone and CoD MWII installed and your game is still bigger than both by like a factor of 2. Also, can I refund the game in the event I don’t want to have to reformat my entire drive?
Also you mentioned HARD DRIVE. For clarity I have an NVME SSD M.2. And no it is not an external drive. If I fail to find a proper resolution to this I would like to raise this matter since I am not committing 380GB for this game thanks
Edit: Sorry, but since you seem to be aware of this possible issue, couldn’t you give me a proper cluster size then? I want an answer to this so I have a frame of reference so I can determine if the fault is on me or the game. Thank you
For an NVMe SSD it’s my understanding it should be 4 KB. It sounds like a larger cluster size may not be applicable in this case as I’d expect it to also impact other installations such as Warzone, etc.
The only other possibility I can think of is bloated AppData, but I’m not sure this would reflect in its overall install size. Still, you may wish to check the size of Users\[NAME]\AppData\Roaming\Fatshark\Darktide
I can certainly help with a refund if Steam are unable to issue one.
This isn’t an issue with DT or Steam, it’s caused by the way your drive is formatted. Every storage device (HDD, SSD, NVMe) is divided into fixed-size blocks when it’s formatted, and that size can’t be changed without reformatting.
The drive where you installed DT looks like it was formatted with 2 MB blocks, which is a poor choice for most use cases. Right-click the folder, choose Properties, and check the Size and Size on disk values. They should be a little different, but not by much. On my system, they’re off by about 300 MB.
To test this, I actually reformatted a drive with 2 MB blocks, and Windows reported 78.2 GB for size but 384 GB on disk. That happens because any file that doesn’t fit perfectly into a 2 MB chunk wastes up to 1.999 MB of space. By comparison, a normal 4 KB block size only wastes up to 3.999 KB per file.
If this is your Windows system drive, you’re pretty much stuck unless you reinstall Windows from scratch. If it’s not, the fix is easier: back up your files, reformat the drive with the default 4 KB block size, then restore your files.
PS default block size for NTFS is generally 4k, for very large drives it sometimes uses 8k, or 16k. It will never do 2M by default.
PPS you don’t need to be rude to the CM. They’re trying to be helpful and the issue is 100% how your computer is setup.
The underlying structure of the hardware for most modern storage is broken into 4KB blocks, NVME, SSD, even good old spinning rust… but there’s a file system on top of that which has it’s own block size that is set when it’s formatted. NTFS is normally 4k, but it can be set as high as 2M. Other games may not be impacted as severely if they package their files up into large asset packs.
The file system block size can be verified with the following in power shell:
Here’s an example of the size when it’s installed on a drive formatted with 4k blocks and a drive formatted with 2M blocks. The ‘size’ is the same, but the’ size on disk’ is drastically different.
