Empty 4TB Seagate Drive Has Quite A Lot Used

[p a t r i c k]

I couldn't work out the ideal forum here for this question so I have put it here in the Mac Pro forum because that is the nearest.

I have just put a new 4TB Seagate Desktop HDD.15 drive into my Mac Pro. The big 4TB hard drive is completely empty, but ProSoft's Drive Genius 3 tells me that 682.89 MB is Used. I know there is always some space already used but 682.89 MB seems like a lot to me. It is 0.02% of the total drive capacity.

I wonder if that is a normal amount of drive space to be already used up by one of these big drives?

Thank you.

 

[flowrider]

Reinitialize the drive using Apple's Disk Utility. Format the drive using the setting Mac OS extended (Journaled).

Lou

 

[p a t r i c k]

Thank you for your reply Lou.

The drive has already been reformatted using Apple's Disk Utility using Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

As a detail in fact this was done using the OS on the OS Installation disc of the Mac Pro as Mountain Lion has a problem initialising 4 TB discs but the OS on the Install discs is 10.5 and that has not problem initialising 4 TB discs.

 

[Krevnik]

Thank you for your reply Lou.

The drive has already been reformatted using Apple's Disk Utility using Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

There are "files" that are part of HFS+ that aren't really files, but include data on the filesystem that need to be tracked. These are files that the filesystem itself uses to track the blocks on the drive. Which ones are in use, which ones aren't, and so on. This also includes the journal. These things take up space, even when empty.

With GPT partitioning schemes as well, there's a 200MB partition ahead of the HFS+ partition that eats up some space. It's hard to know for sure exactly what Drive Genius is reporting as taking up the space, but 0.02% is actually pretty decent for HFS+ overhead. I've seen discussion on this before, where the overhead was about 0.06% for smaller drives. So having it shrink in terms of percentage as the drive grows isn't too bad.