Why the disk space on external hard drive of folder occupying which created by `create-react-app` co-CodePudding

I just follow the instructions of [ the folder size via create-react-app command is intimidating 5GB3

But this action above was done on my external disk. I did the same action on my Built-in hard drive and found the disk space of newly created folder is only 244M. Why the difference is so huge and how to resolve it? I guess it is caused by disk fragmentation, but I googled it and it seems that the Mac does not need to be defragmented. My external disk is ExFAT format.

Is this normal? Thank you!

CodePudding user response：

You have a heck of a lot of small files, your files average about 4kiB each (which is reasonable for source code and similar files)

exFat on large drives defaults to a 128kiB cluster size. This improves performamce with large files, but wastes a lot of space with small ones.

Unfortunately I dob't think you can reduce the cluster size without reformatting,