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Enlarged files after copying to new hard drive

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clarkvance

Technical User
Jun 10, 2001
5
US
I recently bought a used hard drive (brand name Parity) to use as a backup for my B/W G3. When I tried to copy my files to the new hard drive they all became enlarged, some extremely (like from 24K to 271K). I also noticed that many of the files were the same new size, the most common sizes being 136K, 271K, 542K and 678K. Since there is sort of a mathematical pattern here I thought it might be something obvious but I can't find anyone who has ever heard of such a thing. I'm anxious to solve the problem because if I don't, this new hard drive is pretty worthless since it's already filled up in no time with large files that were previously small. Thanks for any help anyone can offer.
 
Hi there is an older mac disk format, HFS,that has a small fixed number of blocks, so when HDs grew to be over a gig the individual blocks grew very large. Since any one file can use at minimum one block, small files grow a lot.

Starting with MacOS 8, you can use HFS+, a newer disk format that allows MANY more blocks, (2 billion?) so the minimum file size tends to be 4k blocks, so small files use much less room!

Sadly you cannot reformat, without losing all the data, but if it is still on the old drive, reformat the new drive using HFS+ (sometimes called extended HFS)

I tried to remain child-like, all I acheived was childish.
 
I just finished downloading the driver software and tried it on the new hard drive and it worked great! Fortunately, there was no loss of information as I had not as yet erased anything on my old hard drive. I really love the internet for things like this. It might have taken me days (or months), not to mention wasted money just to find the solution to this problem. Thank god for people like you who take the time to read these posts and offer solutions (especially in a way I could understand easily). Thank you so much!
 
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