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I just got a new larger external hard drive and transferred all the files from my old drive to the new one.

When I was checking the used space to make sure everything transferred, I found that the new drive was about 70gb larger than the old one, despite being entirely empty previous to backing up the old drive onto it.

Upon further investigation I found that while every file said it was the same size, the "__ space on disk" did not match the files byte size. Here's an example

properties

Tech specs:

Old Drive: seagate 1 TB HFS+ format 8,03.7 GB used
New Drive: seagate 4 TB exfat format 8,71.0 GB used

I formatted the new one with exfat so it would work with both mac and pc. Is the extra used space caused by the difference in format?

Xen2050
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zander
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1 Answers1

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This is likely due to a difference in sector/block size on the disk... Which is probably due to the change in disk format from HFS+ to ExFAT.

Drives can only store a single file in a sector, with larger files spanning many sectors. Files that are smaller than a sector still occupy that sector, which means they use more space on the disk than their actual file size.

Stese
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