is this normal???

Hey everyone!

I transferred about 80 gigs of data from my fat32 formatted external drive to my new HFS+ formatted drive. I noticed that the fat32 drive has a total of 85.32 gigs being used and my hfs+ has 83.23 gigs being used. I copied everything but am wondering why there is a difference in size.

Thanks!

Probably has something to do with cluster sizes for the filesystem. FAT32 isn't too efficient in terms of storage. You can search Google for cluster size and slack for more details.

Bubba is right on the money here.

The way to think of it is like a parking lot . The parking lot is the same size regardless of the format (after all, a 250Gig HDD is a 250Gig HDD). The difference between FAT32 and HFS+ is the cluster size.

HFS+ uses a smaller cluster size so it's parking spaces are much smaller, ergo, it has more spaces to fill. FAT32 on the other hand, needs a bigger parking space even though the cars are the same, thus it has fewer parking spaces in the same size lot.

Now picture your data as the cars in either parking lot. You can pack more cars in the HFS+ lot more densly leaving more spaces (empty space) for more cars.

This sounded much more accessible in my head. I hope it helps.

Mark

i see........

so all in all, every file i transferred should still be there?