Design
Like other disk image formats, a WIM file contains a set of files and associated filesystem metadata. However, unlike sector-based formats (such as ISO or VHD), WIM is file-based, which means that the smallest unit of information is a file. The primary advantages of being file-based is hardware independence and single-instance storage of a file referenced multiple times in the filesystem tree.
Since the files are stored inside a single WIM file, the overhead of opening and closing many individual files is reduced. The cost of reading or writing many thousands of individual files on the local disk is negated by hardware and software-based disk caching as well as sequential reading and writing of the data.
WIM files can contain multiple disk images, which are referenced either by their numerical index or by their unique name. Due to the use of single-instance storage, the more each successive disk image has in common with previous images added to the WIM file, the less new data will be added. A WIM can also be split (spanned) into multiple parts, which have the .swm extension.
Read more about this topic: Windows Imaging Format
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