WD My Book 4tb 4gb filled with air

EliasModernell · Jan 24, 2014

I have a brand new drive. And copied to it a 928mb folder. After a while a cheked the propierties of the folder and it indicated 928mb in size,BUT next I checked the drive's propierties and it says total used space 5,76 gb. From WD I was advised to format the drive. After the format, I copied again the same folder and once more there was this mismatch between the folder size and the total used space of the drive. I checked for invisible files and that's not the problem. I can give you some screenshots if you want. Any help will be appreciated, EDIT: email address removed by Moderator

igortferreira · Jan 24, 2014

1 - Try to run the drive on a different USB port (try USB 2.0 and 3.0), once i need to update the USB 3.0 windows driver to make one of my devices work right, usually USB 2.0 doesn't have that problem. If the problem persist, i suggest you to run a diagnose program from western digital "Data Lifeguard Diagnostic" and check if the drive has any hardware problem.
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=621&sid=3&lang=bp
If you find any problem, RMA it... it´s not uncommon get a bad one, even if it´s new...
good luck!

Solandri · Jan 24, 2014

The folder size is the size of the files in the folder.

The used space on the drive is the size those files take up on disk, and will always be larger (unless you have compression turned on).

The disk is divided in clusters, which have a certain minimum size. If a file is smaller than this minimum, the rest of the cluster is padded with zeros. The minimum cluster size depends on the format you've picked for the drive - newer filesystems like NTFS may use clusters as small as 512 bytes, older filesystems like FAT on a large drive may end up using a cluster size that's several megabytes.

Long story short, if you have a lot of small files, they will have a lot of zeros at the end to fill out the cluster, and the used space the drive reports will be much larger than the size of the folder. If you right-click the folder and select properties, it'll show you both the size of the files and the space it takes on disk.

EliasModernell · Mar 20, 2014

Solandri :

Hello Solandri, I do not understand much of clusters but according to what you say, this is not a problem at all. It's the normal behaviour of the drive, right? But how come the folks from WD keep suggesting me that I reformat the drive. I have another external drive, a 1 tb LG and it doesn't present this problem. Thanks for your answer and forgive mi ignorance please answer if you have any further advise.

EliasModernell · Mar 25, 2014

Hello, yesterday a guy from WD used a diagnosis sowftware on my disk. It filled the drive with zeros and erased all data on the drive. Then he continued to copy and paste the same 928 mb folder I mentioned on my first post. Initially, the propierties of the folder and used space were almost the same (folder 928 mb used space 1 gb) But after a few minutes, the used space changed again to 5,76 gb. I don't know if this is important but the size of the folder and the size on disk are the same, the total used space is what differs 928 mb / 5,75 gb

Can anyone give me some advice please? So far the Solandri's explanation is the most convincing, still I'm shocked the pp from WD cannot account for the behavior of the disk and consider it a problem (and one they cannot solve)

Thanks for your time.

Search

WD My Book 4tb 4gb filled with air

EliasModernell

Honorable

igortferreira

igortferreira

Honorable

Solandri

Illustrious

EliasModernell

Honorable

EliasModernell

Honorable

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page