I'm getting a huge difference in the Size vs the Size on Disk of a copy of a folder I've made to an external HDD. I've read up a bit on cluster size / allocation units, so I would imagine this has something to do with that, but could it really cause an almost four-times increase to the Size on Disk? This is what I'm seeing in the Properties of the folder in question.
Mainly, I just want to see if anyone has any ideas as to the reason behind this 4x difference in size disparity, and whether there's a way to fix it somehow without reformatting the drive. It is a lot of data, but the transfer speeds were exceedingly slow, even for an HDD (averaging 10MB/s). Any ideas on what could be causing this? This is a new, previously unused drive, and my cable/ports are fine.
Additionally, I'm on Windows11, and my drive is formatted ExFAT with the intention of being compatible with MacOS as well. For what it's worth, the drive will not even mount when I connect it to my Mac, and when I try to mount manually in Disk Utility, I get an error saying it could not mount. No issues mounting in Windows though.
I appreciate it!
