[bjresta]

Okay, what's going on here?

I recently installed a new 120 GB internal hard drive in my old slot iMac (replacing the 20 GB original drive).

I made the transfer by cloning the contents of the original drive to a volume on an external drive by using Carbon Copy Cloner. I then installed the new internal drive and used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the contents of the external volume to a new volume on my new internal hard drive (I partitioned the new drive into three equal partitions).

After a few days of running off the new internal drive, and without adding any significant files, I found that both Disk Utility and Get Info report a larger amount of disk space used than I anticipated.

The original internal hard drive used 19 GB out of 20 GB capacity.

The external hard drive volume now shows 19 GB used out of 38 GB

The new internal hard drive volume shows 31 GB used out of 37.8 GB.

I have used the WhatSize application to locate any hidden files that are eating up space. I do not find any. Indeed, WhatSize shows that the files and folders (both visible and invisible) on the new internal hard drive volume are equal in size to the files and folders on the external hard drive volume.

So... what is eating up the space? Why doesn't it show up using WhatSize? What can I do about it?



iMac slot 450 MHz
1 GB SDRAM
Mac OS X version 10.3.8

[oscar]

Larger hard drives have larger block sizes. so that 120Gb might have a block size of 8K or maybe even 16K. so thats means even a empty file will take up 8 or 16 K. macosx has thousands of very small files. I have a 60 gigger and i have 4K block sizes

[bjresta]

Both the external drive and the new internal drive are 120 GB disks partitioned into three equal volumes. I would think they would have about the same block size. Could a difference in block size could make up the difference between 19 GB and 31 GB?

[Randman]

Why the partitions?

[SMacTech]

Originally posted by Randman:
Why the partitions?

Why not ? Maybe he is a developer or dual boots or enjoys what some believe are advantages to partitioning.

Block size is not going to account for GB's of data.

Have you used any BitTorrent apps, or have any large downloads that possibly started and never finished ?

[Randman]

Originally posted by SMacTech:
Why not ? Maybe he is a developer or dual boots or enjoys what some believe are advantages to partitioning.

Maybe. Maybe not. That's what I asked, thank you very much.

[SMacTech]

Originally posted by Randman:
Maybe. Maybe not. That's what I asked, thank you very much.

You are welcome.

To remain on topic : partitioning would not account for the GB loss either.

Maybe you have generated large log files. I heard a recent McAlly USB driver with 10.3.8 caused problems where it created hundreds of thousand of entries in the system log.

Possibly your whatsize application is overlooking some kind of file type. Maybe try and use TinkerTool to show hidden files. Don't overlook your swap files possibly remaining on the drive too, although I don't expect that as the source.