Why is my MATLAB R2015b installation 56GB in size?

I installed the version of Matlab and Simulink + all of the related packages of the version mentioned in the title on a 64GB Kingston microSD card on my laptop. The installation took forever, and in order to perform it successfully I had to change the default download directory in the installer script to the microSD-card using the cmd-command: "( location of downloaded MATLAB installer on my system drive)" -downloadFolder "Target folder on the SD-card". This is because my laptop system drive is too small to hold all of the 15GB of MATLAB goodness.

What baffles me is that after the installation my SD-card now has about 2GB of free space left. I thought that MATLAB + Simulink were supposed to take only a maximum of 15GB of space with all of the modules installed. Is this not correct? What could be causing this?

I checked for duplicate files using CCleaner, and the program found huge amounts of very small files that had at least 1 copy of them, but in a different directory. To give you an example, there are 2 copies of zlib1.dll in the \bin and \toolbox subfolders respectively. However, this structuring of the files seems intentional.

The program itself seems to run just fine, at a speed comparable to running it on a laptop that actually has an SSD larger than 32GB as a system drive (like mine). Is there anything I could do to reduce the installation size on the SD-card without having to download all of the full software package again? I kind of need the extra space on the SD-card for other uses as well besides storing a buggy installation of MATLAB.

[Alessandro Roux]

Hi Santtu,

KDirStat (Linux), WinDirStat (Windows), and Disk Inventory X (Mac) will quantify disk usage. They list the space occupied by individual files and generate visually-pleasing charts that show memory footprints for each file.

It may be worth using your platform's implementation to see where the additional bulk is coming from on your SD card.

Best,

Alessandro

Answer 1

[Philip Borghesani]

How is the card formatted? What is the output of chkdsk on the card?

If the card is formatted fat32 or exFAT (default for SDXC) then the minimum file size (cluster size) will be quite large wasting large amounts of space.

See this link on default cluster sizes that Microsoft uses :

[Santtu Söderholm]

This was indeed the issue. The installation still took forever, but it is now sitting at roughly 10GB and working as intended. Thanks for taking the time to answer my question.

Answer 2

[Edmund Tay]

Hi can I know how should I format my Micro SD card on my surface 3 or the steps needed in order to install it matlab 2016b with minimum size. As the total installation size including file is roughly 40GB. If possible please tell me in layman terms as I'm not good with computers. Thank you :)

[Siddharth Magadum]

Hi, did you install the MATLAB ? . Did it consumed 40 GB space?

And does the installation requires active internet ?

In my case the 2020b installer shows that it requires 44 Gb of space.