Resolved Were did the hard drive space go?

Since I do video editing, I decided this weekend to upgrade my 200 GB Western Digital data drive to a 750 GB Seagate. (I used a separate smaller drive for the operating system files).

I formatted the new drive to 4096 bit clusters, just like the old one. I used a third external backup drive to carefully copy all the content that was on the 200GB drive to the 750GB drive. I verified after copying the information that both drives have the same number of files and same space used by each folder, just to be sure I didn't miss anything.

The old drive takes about 105GB of space to hold 104.4 GB of files (104.4determined by adding the space used for each folder).

But the new drive takes 143 GB to hold the same number of files which still take 104.4 GB when I add the folders up. So it is like it uses an extra 38 GB to store the same information.

I've searched for hidden files.

I ran chkdsk on both the old and new drives. No problems were found on the new one, and both drives state the same "4096 bytes in each allocation unit. "

I deleted all files in the recycle bin that came from the D: drive.

I defragged the new 750 drive, although it had hardly any fragmentation since it was just loaded, and it didn't change the space required at all.



Does anyone have any other suggestions on where the extra space is being used on the larger drive?

Terry

 

Solved!

Pete, unchecking the System Restore option solved the problem. The used space immediately dropped to 105 GB. I didn't even realize that this function existed. Since this D: drive is only used for application data and documents, and I fully back up that which I'd need to recover, I see no reason for using System Restore here. I've left it on for my C: drive.

Thank you very much. I've spent hours trying to fix this, should have come here first. This site is great!!

Terry