Hi Could someone please give me a hand.. Every time i transfer files
from one firewire hard dirve to another firewire hardrive the file
size's dont always match..

Eg transfering 22gigs from one hardrive to another will give me a file
size of 20gig's even though all the files have been transfered.

Thanks

Don't ever pay attention to file sizes because they can be based on
different directory information, thereby giving you different "size"
readings in Megabytes. Just make sure all the files are there and test one
or two of them, and you should be okay.


Kind Regards,
Nathaniel
--
flikWORLD Design
reply to: nat at flikworld(dot)com


in article 74a03aa0.0312191125.419548cb@posting.google.com, L.S at
neworder7********.com wrote on 12/19/03 11:25 AM:

> Hi Could someone please give me a hand.. Every time i transfer files
> from one firewire hard dirve to another firewire hardrive the file
> size's dont always match..
>
> Eg transfering 22gigs from one hardrive to another will give me a file
> size of 20gig's even though all the files have been transfered.
>
> Thanks

Most likely you have one hard-drive formated with HFS and the other one
with HFS+. The HFS filesystem can only track so many allocation blocks
for files. So the minimum block size on a 40gb drive is around 64kb or
128-sectors at a time. That means if you save a 2-byte file, like a file
that had "HI" in it, it would still occupy 65,535-bytes of space on the
disk. So a total of 2-bytes is used for storage, and 65,533-bytes are
wasted. If you have a lot of small files, the actually amount of wasted
space can be significant.

With HFS+, the minimum allocation block size is 512-bytes (0.5kb) even
for the larger drive sizes. So if your second hard-drive is formatted
with HFS+, it will be much more efficient.

Here's a test, GET-INFO on both folders on both drives. It should show
you the same number of files in each folder right? Then look at the
total number of bytes in side the parentheses, it should be the same
right? That's the actual amount of information in the files stored in
those folders. However the "On Disk" section shows how much is actually
used on the disk for those sizes.

So on the HFS disk, 20gb of data actually requires 22gb of disk-space
because of the wasted sectors at the end of each allocation block. On
the HFS+ disk, there wasted space is limited to the remainder of the
sector where the last piece of data resides. So this wasted space is
never more than 511-bytes per file; much more efficient. On the HFS+
disk then, 20gb of data will actually occupy only 20gb of space.

-danno

> Hi Could someone please give me a hand.. Every time i transfer files
> from one firewire hard dirve to another firewire hardrive the file
> size's dont always match..
>
> Eg transfering 22gigs from one hardrive to another will give me a file
> size of 20gig's even though all the files have been transfered.

One thing im wondering that might affect the size of the files on the
Hard drive could be because my Internal HD is formated MAC OS Extended
HD and on the external firewire hard dive is formated MAC OS
Standard.

Any thoughts

Nathaniel Flick <nat@flikworld.com> wrote in message news:<BC0AB241.1A59%nat@flikworld.com>...
> Don't ever pay attention to file sizes because they can be based on
> different directory information, thereby giving you different "size"
> readings in Megabytes. Just make sure all the files are there and test one
> or two of them, and you should be okay.
>
>
> Kind Regards,
> Nathaniel
> --
> flikWORLD Design
> reply to: nat at flikworld(dot)com
>
>
> in article 74a03aa0.0312191125.419548cb@posting.google.com, L.S at
> neworder7********.com wrote on 12/19/03 11:25 AM:
>
> > Hi Could someone please give me a hand.. Every time i transfer files
> > from one firewire hard dirve to another firewire hardrive the file
> > size's dont always match..
> >
> > Eg transfering 22gigs from one hardrive to another will give me a file
> > size of 20gig's even though all the files have been transfered.
> >
> > Thanks

As far as I know, formatting different drives with different formats changes
the way the data is placed. Between the two, there's a difference in the
sectors in the way they are layed out. One has larger sectors than the
other, I think, which might then give you different size readings for your
files.

I view file sizes like progress bars. They don't really mean much when you
look at the numbers (ever seen a countdown start at "One hour" and then
speed along, only taking 10 minutes to complete?) Even between drives
formatted exactly alike‹even on the same drive‹I have seen the file size
appear to change after the save.

Kind Regards,
Nathaniel
--
flikWORLD Design
reply to: nat at flikworld(dot)com


n article 74a03aa0.0401081025.3e850e1c@posting.google.com, L.S at
neworder7********.com wrote on 1/8/04 10:25 AM:

> One thing im wondering that might affect the size of the files on the
> Hard drive could be because my Internal HD is formated MAC OS Extended
> HD and on the external firewire hard dive is formated MAC OS
> Standard.
>
> Any thoughts
>
> Nathaniel Flick <nat@flikworld.com> wrote in message
> news:<BC0AB241.1A59%nat@flikworld.com>...
>> Don't ever pay attention to file sizes because they can be based on
>> different directory information, thereby giving you different "size"
>> readings in Megabytes. Just make sure all the files are there and test one
>> or two of them, and you should be okay.
>>
>>
>> Kind Regards,
>> Nathaniel
>> --
>> flikWORLD Design
>> reply to: nat at flikworld(dot)com
>>
>>
>> in article 74a03aa0.0312191125.419548cb@posting.google.com, L.S at
>> neworder7********.com wrote on 12/19/03 11:25 AM:
>>
>>> Hi Could someone please give me a hand.. Every time i transfer files
>>> from one firewire hard dirve to another firewire hardrive the file
>>> size's dont always match..
>>>
>>> Eg transfering 22gigs from one hardrive to another will give me a file
>>> size of 20gig's even though all the files have been transfered.
>>>
>>> Thanks