I'm not sure of the details but I don't think you need 30MB of RAM to load a 8k file.  It's how much space is being allocated to one sector.  Since the 8k file is smaller than hard drive's allocation size that one file gets the whole space to itself.  But when it's loaded, only 8k of actual data gets sent over the cable to the CPU and RAM.

You're just wasting disk space, not RAM space.