Page 864 - Windows 10 May 2019 Update The Missing Manual: The Book That Should Have Been in the Box

Chapter 17. The Disk Chapter

To make life easier for you, the terminology of objects on your computer

screen precisely mirrors the terminology of the real world. You use the
computer to create files, just as in the real world. You put those files into
folders, just as in the real world. And you put those folders into filing

cabinets—

Well, OK. The metaphor goes only so far.

There is a term for the larger storage entity that holds all those files and

folders, though: disks.

Nobody uses floppy disks anymore, and even CDs and DVDs are rapidly
disappearing. But spinning hard drives are still cheap, big, reliable, and

common, and SSDs (solid-state drives) are popular in laptops, despite their
relatively high cost and small capacity.

In any case, this chapter is all about storage and disks: cleanups,

defragmentation, compression, encryption, analysis, and management.

Note
Some of the features mentioned in this chapter—dynamic disks, disk compression, and EFS
(encrypting file system)—all require the NTFS file system on your computer’s disk drives. That’s
probably what you’re using on your main hard drive, because Windows 10 requires it.
But many other kinds of disks—memory cards, flash drives, and so on—use the older FAT32 file
system instead. You won’t be able to use NTFS tricks on them.

Storage Sense: More Gigs, Yours Free

Your PC sits at the unhappy pinch point between two opposing trends: the
growing size of today’s files (videos, photos, music) and the shrunken size
of our available storage (the non–hard disks on today’s laptops).