[ The PC Guide | Troubleshooting and Repair Guide | The Troubleshooting Expert | Troubleshooting Specific Components | Troubleshooting Hard Disk Drives | Missing Space Issues ]

I copied the data from a smaller hard disk volume to a larger one and now it takes up more space

Explanation: You put a new hard disk in your system and transferred the information from your older, smaller hard disk to the new one, only to find that the same files are taking up significantly more room.

Diagnosis: The usual cause of this problem is that the larger disk is using a larger cluster size. Under the FAT file system only whole clusters can be assigned to a file, so the larger the cluster size, the more space that is wasted; this is called slack. If you have 3,000 files taking up 300 MB of space on a 340 MB hard disk, then on average, 12 MB of that is wasted space due to the cluster size. Transferring that same data to a new 1 GB hard disk (partitioned in a single volume) will cause the same files to take up about 312 MB of space because the cluster size on the new disk will be 16 KB instead of 8KB.

Recommendation:

• Don't worry about it. I mean, if you just upgraded from a 300 MB disk to a 2 GB disk and now your 300 MB takes up 312 MB or even 350 MB, so what? A 2 GB disk costs about $200 today, making 100 MB of disk space, purchased as part of a 2 GB disk, worth about 10 bucks.
• If you want to reclaim the lost hard disk space, partition your larger disk into several smaller partitions. Read this part of the Reference Guide that discusses tradeoffs in selecting partition sizes.
• Upgrade to Windows 95 OEM SR2, which includes the FAT32 file system that lets you create large volumes with small cluster sizes. First, read about the tradeoffs in using FAT32 here.

Home  -  Search  -  Topics  -  Up