Stump the hard disk experts?

[realmadmartian]

Well, Western Digital support is baffled. I have 2 WD5000KS drives (SATA II 500GB). I copied files from several smaller drives onto the first drive, and then backed up the first drive onto the second drive. In theory, the two drives should be identical or close to it. Well, if I do a "select all" on all the files and folders and click Properties, indeed both drives are identical - same number of files and directories, same total size, same total size on disk. Looking good. HOWEVER, I select properties on the drive itself, and the files on the source drive take up 14 GIGS more space! This is also reflected in the free space. Now this makes no sense. Some other details:

1. Both System and Hidden files are visible.
2. Recycle bin and Norton recycle bin are empty.
3. I defragged the target drive - no change.
4. I ran Western Digital diagnostics extended test - all is good.
5. I ran Norton Disc Doctor - all is good.


Any ideas?

Top row is "source" drive, bottom row is "target" drive:

 

[Hawkeye22]

Not sure, but my first guess is you formatted the drives using different cluster sizes. I think the default is 4k for NTFS.

EDIT: Giving further thought, the differnce in size is quite a bit even when using 64k clusters and lots of small files, but I'm not ruling it out.

Also, you may want to try disabling system restore on both drives and see if the sizes sync up.

Are there any other 3rd party utilities that are hiding folders/files from view?

 

[jap0nes]

okay, you have 3 drives then? or 2? because if you have only 2, the first one will hold the pagefile, and i dont know if it can be copied. The cluster size may influence directly, like HawkEye said

 

[realmadmartian]

Aha! System Restore was the answer! The reason they differed was because one drive was freshly formatted while with the other I had deleted some files in the process. I had no idea that Windows runs System Restore on EVERY drive, including removables. No doubt this will speed up my video editing as well. Thanks much.

Is there really any good reason to run System Restore? Has anyone every actually used it and found it useful? Seems I could save lots of time and space by not using it.

 

[mpjesse]

i've used system restore several times and it has saved my as*s several times.

but i'm always doing crazy stuff w/ my computer so...

 

[realmadmartian]

Has it saved you only on your boot drive or on data drives as well? I have 1 boot and 5 data drives.

 

[Hawkeye22]

I've used system restore before and it has got me out of jams, however I've never been certain what exactly system restore does on a non-system drive. I usually leave system restore turned on for my OS drive, although I crank it down to 1% of my drive instead of the default 12%. I turn it off on all other drives.

 

[foshizzle]

Yea, I'm not sure what system restore does on non-system drives either. And yes it has also saved my behind many times so I would never turn it off. But I crank it down to that it only takes a few GB of space vs the insane 12% default (that's 60GB on a 500GB drive!)

That's kind of funny (but not surprising) that tech support people wouldn't think of system restore.

 

[JonathanDeane]

Yea, I'm not sure what system restore does on non-system drives either. And yes it has also saved my behind many times so I would never turn it off. But I crank it down to that it only takes a few GB of space vs the insane 12% default (that's 60GB on a 500GB drive!)

That's kind of funny (but not surprising) that tech support people wouldn't think of system restore.

Yeah 4-5 GB's would be plenty I should think lol 60 GB's should be for compressed drive images !!!

 

[rushfan]

System Restore is better than nothing but Acronis True Image is the best. I'd sell you on it's merits but you might want to check it out for yourself. I have buggered things up that System Restore could not recover from but True Image has never let me down.