Hard Drive Capacity Confusion

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

Hey all, 

This is my first time posting here, thanks for reading. 

I own a 500 GB WesternDigital Hard Drive on which there are six folders. I am attempting to transfer all six folders onto a new, 3 TB Seagate Hard Drive. 

When I choose ‘get info’ on the 500 GB WD, the information reads: 
-Capacity: 500GB
-Used: 449.01 GB on disk

I merged all 6 folders into a single folder, and transferred that folder onto the 3 TB Seagate. After the folder had completed the transfer, I chose ‘get info’, expecting to see ‘449.01 GB’. This was not the case. Instead, the single folder (containing the 6 mentioned) read a total capacity of 154.31 GB. 

I used DiskRadar to investigate the matter, and the program is telling me that ‘system files’ are taking up 58.9% of the hard drive. What in the heck are system files, and why are they taking up so much space?

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_file

The files appear to be corrupted.

however, there is another scenario… have you recently deleted files from the old 500 gb drive?

the mac will still reflect those files as been on the hd even when you have drag then to the garbage bin.

if that’s not the case run first aid on both drives using disk utilities 

remember that this is a hypothesis and does not mean it has to be one of the two… but lest start with this assumption and see what else we can do