External Hard Drive Trouble

F

fabby

Registered
This isn't about hard drive failure or anything like that, but this is kind of puzzling for me, and I have no idea why it would happen.

I had a Firewire External Hard Drive, and that ended up failing. (its in the freezer right now) So I started to use a USB drive from Lacie, one of their Lego Brick ones. Its been working fine. Its a 280 GB drive, and I should have around 100 gigs left. It's full of mostly Pro Tools files, but I've started to fill it up with photography also. This is where the trouble has began. I put files onto the computer, and they take up way more space than they should. I transfer a 170 MB folder of pictures into the drive, and it takes up probably around 4 GB of space. What's happening here?

thanks for the help.
 
That's exactly how you tell -- and yikes, that's an old format that uses much bigger block sizes. "Mac OS Standard" was introduced long ago in the 90s, and was replaced by HFS+, or "Mac OS Extended," which used smaller blocks and allowed files to essentially take up a little less space.

Going from 170MB to a few gigabytes seems unlikely, but it is true that files typically take up more space on a HFS-formatted drive than an HFS+("plus")-formatted drive.

My first recommendation would be to back up the data on the drive and reformat the drive into a "Mac OS (Extended)" partition or partitions, then put the data back and see if you experience the same thing.
 
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