[jthrasher]

I just bought a Ezquest Cobra 80gb drive to have extra storage for my powerbook G3 Lombard. I am noticing when I copy files to it that they read as much bigger files than they do on my laptops drive. Ex. a file on my powerbook reads as 512.2mb. the same file on the firewire drive reads as 13.3gb!!! The same with all the rest of the files. So my huge 80gb drive isn't so huge anymore. What's going on??? jthrasher0@aol.com

[clarkgoble]

File systems often have a "smallest block" which is the smallest amount of data they can store. Because any file system keeps track of only a certain number of blocks they divide files up into the needed number of blocks. This means that if you have a 1K file but the block size is 16K it will take 16K on disk.

Generally because a larger disk stores more info, they increase the block size.

I could be wrong, but I believe WinXP has variable sized blocks and I *thought* OSX did as well. Am I wrong here? I thought that was one of the additions to HFS when HFS+ came out. But I guess not.

You might want to post this over on one of the OSX forums to see if someone else knows. It's been so long since I did any Mac disk programming that I last used the Inside Macintosh manuals!

Still the sizes you listed seem a tad off. Your file went from ~500 megabytes to 13 gigabytes? Was that for all files or for a single file? If the former it doesn't seem that off if you had lots of little files. For the later then something weird is definitely going on.

[ 01-30-2002: Message edited by: clarkgoble ]

[zigzag]

I would bet that the drive is formatted for HFS instead of HFS+. I would back-up your files and re-format the drive with Drive Setup. Be sure to designate HFS+.