I've got two physical drives on my PC: an SSD (C drive) and an HDD (D drive). Recently, I've noticed that when I move files from D to C, the sizes don't match up the way I expect. For example, if I move a folder that's 9GB from the D drive, it somehow becomes 13GB on the C drive, even though the properties still show it as ~9GB and ~3GB on disk. However, if I download a file directly to the C drive or move it from C to D and back, the size remains the same. I just recently formatted my PC, and this issue started after that; it didn't happen before. Using WinDirStat, it shows that the physical size and logical size are different, which is confusing me. Is there something about the drives being desynced that causes this, especially with larger game files?
2 Answers
Is the file you're moving a single large file or is it a folder filled with smaller files? That could affect the reported size when you move it across drives!
It sounds like you might have partitions formatted with different file systems. For instance, one drive could be NTFS while the other is FAT32 or exFAT. Each file system has different cluster sizes, which affects the 'Size on disk' you see. It's super common!
Are there any fixes for this to keep the file sizes consistent? I checked and both my drives are NTFS.
It's actually folders, not just one big file.