When dealing with source code from projects of various sizes the disk quickly gets filled up with literally tens or even hundreds of thousands of files. Especially when the project is under source control and has metadata files for each of the project’s file. While you may still have a lot of disk space left on the drive I found that this kind of setup is highly inefficient when jumping from file to file in an IDE or doing a full text search. While thinking of a quick fix for that one thing came to mind – virtual disk images. So I grabbed my TrueCrypt and created a few volumes for the bigger projects. I know that TrueCrypt is not actually meant for that, but while I was creating the volumes I realized that in my case this was an advantage, because not only am I creating a single file on the physical disk that will be easier to maintain, but also I’m encrypting all the project data thus gaining an additional security layer. I’m not going to get into the details of actually creating a volume file since it is well documented in the TrueCrypt Beginner’s Tutorial though I will advice one thing. Source code files under source control contain a whole lot of tiny metadata files which contain less than 1KB of information, but the most common file system cluster size is 4KB. In practice this means that if you have a file on your disk which contains only the string “hello, world” it will still occupy 4KB of disk space (assuming that your disk’s cluster size is 4KB). It’s the smallest amount of data that can be allocated for file storage. You can read more about cluster sizes here and here. When creating a virtual disk image TrueCrypt lets you choose the cluster size before formating the volume. In my case selecting the smallest available cluster size like 512 Bytes is the most efficient choice and in some cases saved nearly 20MB. I know it’s not much, but I just like things efficient