I purchased an 8TB My Book to replace a 3TB WD external. I copied the files from the old drive on to the new drive. On the old drive the files occupied 1.56 TB of space, on the new drive the exact same files occupied 2.52 TB of space. The only difference is the formatting (old drive is NTFS, new drive is exFat). Could the format be the difference?? If so, can I reformat? If not, do you have any other suggestions?
Quite possible, but the math doesn’t seem to work out for me:
If I recall correctly, ExFAT’s default file allocation unit size is 128KB, whereas NTFS would be around 4KB.
That means that a 1 byte file would consume 128KB of space on the ExFAT volume, but only 4KB on the NTFS volume.
You’d have to have MILLIONS of files in order to soak up another 1TB of overhead…
