Preallocated space on SSD

[magmag]

I'm using a program called "Free Download Manager" and what I noticed about it is that it reserves the whole size for any big file before I download e.g. It reserved around 4.1 GB when I tried to download the Windows 10 iso 64 bit. I'm using a Samsung SSD and I'm curious to know: Does this pre-allocation do an actual write cycles for the whole 4.1 GB size even if the download is still in the very beginning?

 

[LMiller7]

Preallocating space for a file does not require much disk activity. It does not mean that the reserved space will be written to. For practical purposes virtually none of it will be.

 

[magmag]

Preallocating space for a file does not require much disk activity. It does not mean that the reserved space will be written to. For practical purposes virtually none of it will be.

so what you actually mean is that it didn't happen any actual 4.1 GB writing on my SSD but rather a remark sent to the SSD to reserve all that space for what's going to be downloaded later. Am I right?

 

[LMiller7]

There are a number of ways that space can be preallocated without actually writing the data to the drive. That is if the space was actually reserved and I am not convinced of that. Only the developer would know the details. We do know that 4 GB of data was not written to the drive. Only a novice programmer would do it that way.