Two external HDDs show difference of 200GB usage with the same data?

[EquinzE]

Hey guys, had this account for years but never actually visited the forums much, but I need some help salvaging 200GB of storage being held hostage, and I figured there are a lot of experts on here.

I'm using a Dell G15 gaming laptop with Windows 10, and due to the limiting 512GB M.2 it has on it, I bought an external HDD, except I bought two, one for backup. They're both 4TB drives, one was from Toshiba, the other from Seagate. I was already storing a lot of files and games on the Toshiba drive, 2.58 TB of files, while the Seagate one was empty and I was going to keep it as backup. I tried to copy all the files manually, but in doing so found out that the Seagate drive was using 200GB more data... how and why? I don't know.

 

Does anyone have a clue? Is it a problem with my windows? Is it the file explorer transfer method? (and what other methods can I try? I was thinking of cloning - good or bad idea?)

Some drivers issues associated with the USB or storage devices? What am I missing?

I tried to look online for help but most solutions didn't seem to fit my problem. Some said it could be using MBR instead of GPT (which was not the case), other threads I found on stackexchange forums referred to cases involving server storage and tools that I don't even use.

 

Also, I noticed that when it's 'calculating' when I first initiate the transfer, it takes a lot of time until it gets to 2.58TB, waits a few seconds, then jumps to 2.78 TB. Something is clearly wrong here, it's seeing 200GB out of thin air or something. Both drives are brand new. One is 1 month old the other is a week old.

 

Thank you, I appreciate any help or nudge in the right direction.

[Kilrah]

Are they formatted differently, e.g. one NTFS and one ExFAT? Also even with the same filesystem you can choose different cluster sizes, and if your content consists of many small files a drive formatted with large clusters will have way more overhead loss.

 

You can use TreeSize Free as admin to scan both drives and compare to see if there are files on one you're missing.

[EquinzE]

On 6/17/2022 at 2:32 PM, Kilrah said:

Are they formatted differently, e.g. one NTFS and one ExFAT? Also even with the same filesystem you can choose different cluster sizes, and if your content consists of many small files a drive formatted with large clusters will have way more overhead loss.

 

You can use TreeSize Free as admin to scan both drives and compare to see if there are files on one you're missing.

Thanks for replying, and sorry for taking long to respond, life got in the way..

Both are NTFS, but I don't know about cluster sizes, and yes my content does consist of many small files as well since there are thousands of photos and documents (and numerous node_modules folders) in addition to large files.

 

Update: I just tried the software you mentioned and I noticed this:

 

The Anime folder has a 200GB difference between Size and Allocated. I have a few (large) unfinished torrents in that location, is that why?  Do you know if copying in its current state would affect the torrent progress? I plan on making the Seagate one my primary and leave this for backup (it was significantly faster on random reads from my experience) so I was planning to change the drive letter after copying all the files and resume downloading as normal, do you have any idea if a torrent would be affected by this by mistakenly ignoring the allocated 200GB or is my 200GB safe from being redundant after the downloads finish?

[HARDWELL9191]

6 minutes ago, EquinzE said:

Thanks for replying, and sorry for taking long to respond, life got in the way..

Both are NTFS, but I don't know about cluster sizes, and yes my content does consist of many small files as well since there are thousands of photos and documents (and numerous node_modules folders) in addition to large files.

 

Update: I just tried the software you mentioned and I noticed this:

 

The Anime folder has a 200GB difference between Size and Allocated. I have a few (large) unfinished torrents in that location, is that why?  Do you know if copying in its current state would affect the torrent progress? I plan on making the Seagate one my primary and leave this for backup (it was significantly faster on random reads from my experience) so I was planning to change the drive letter after copying all the files and resume downloading as normal, do you have any idea if a torrent would be affected by this by mistakenly ignoring the allocated 200GB or is my 200GB safe from being redundant after the downloads finish?

You could resume the download of the torrent on another drive, but It would need the same drive letter as this drive now and the same folder directory and the already downloaded files so that the torrent checks the files and starts downloading again. So for example if a torrent is at 30%. You need to copy this 30% of data on the new drive in exactly the same directory and assign the same drive letter. It then should start downloading again. Or you could just redownload the whole torrent no need to complicate things.

[EquinzE]

On 6/21/2022 at 12:56 PM, HARDWELL9191 said:

You could resume the download of the torrent on another drive, but It would need the same drive letter as this drive now and the same folder directory and the already downloaded files so that the torrent checks the files and starts downloading again. So for example if a torrent is at 30%. You need to copy this 30% of data on the new drive in exactly the same directory and assign the same drive letter. It then should start downloading again. Or you could just redownload the whole torrent no need to complicate things.

Redownloading that much on a connection like mine is out of the question xD

Thanks for the help. My concern wasn't whether I could resume the torrent but whether it's going to add on top of the storage it had already used up or preallocated, since it's weird the other drive didn't do the same, but this is not as serious of an issue as I thought so it's not worth keeping this topic open.

Anyway thanks for the help guys.