hard drive 1.31 Gig already but no user data

[Tech198]

been trying to battle this out or a few days.. wit no solution.

I just picked up WD passport 5TB drive, howevr after using DBAN (Windows) and also tried zerodisk on Mac, finally partitioning in Disk Utility. I get 1.31 Gig "used" space,,

This is annoying as it makes no sense, as if I partition on Windows its only 256MB used... Thinkiinng it may be Catalina issue, I also partitioned on Mojave and same, so i bought it down to Mac related.

I don't mind space being used at all as MFT table etc by defualt... but why sooo dam large ?

1.31Gig is a massive cry from what it should be i would think... Spotlight by the way ony taking up 16MB by default, and don't use Time Machine so the .fseventsd or system events, particularly when that shouldn't be large anyway, and no data is even on the drive to begin with

WD passport 5TB does have hardware encryption but not used unless you use WD's own software, however i am wondering if part of the space could be somehow used as well regardless??

Te drive is formatted as HFS+ extended, but I was about to try APFS+ on the drive just to see it i could get that space reduced.. (perhaps)

Any suggestions ?

 

[Tech198]

I bought a 4TB drive just to see, plus ts not wasting because i can just use it as a backup anyway.

I guess that's not so bad then since i see roughty the same used space of another drve, but why is used space soo large ? Larger the drive = ??

 

[Fishrrman]

My thoughts...

The WD drive may have shipped with some proprietary software from WD pre-installed on it. Sometimes there may even be a small "protected partition".

Disk utility may not be able to remove this software.

The solution might be to do this:
- Go to WD's website and download the drive management tools
- Use those tools to check the drive for proprietary software and REMOVE IT if possible.
- Once done, NOW erase the drive using disk utility.

See if this changes anything.

 

[appltech]

Some space on any hard drive is always reserved for metadata, access control lists and whatever else auxiliary information. You will never get 100% of any disk's capacity, so it's all fine, no issues here.