Why does an APK file size of 7.6 MB allocate 1.36 GB on an exFAT formatted external hard drive when reverse-engineered?

Question

I have an apk file size of 7.6 MB . When I reverse-engineer this apk file through apktool , which is a reverse engineering tool for apk files, it allocates 1.36 GB on an exFAT formatted external hard drive. Actually when I extract this apk file on my local drive ( APFS formatted Macintosh HD), it allocates 32.1 MB which is fair. What could be the reason behind this odd situation?

Client:

OS: macOS Catalina 10.15.2

Process: A typical Java process that is executed through a jar file

Answer 1

Check the Memory Allocation Size of the exFAT external HDD. exFAT has a much larger default memory allocation size, and if you went with the default it might me something like 1MB (like mentioned in this post ). This means that all your files that have size < 1MB will actually have size on disk 1MB.

Having lots of files much smaller in size than the MAS would explain the enormous size difference.