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I have an external 4TB WD Element Desktop drive. This is the product:

https://www.wdc.com/products/external-storage/wd-elements-desktop.html

I was fine with the original disk format it came with, done by WD factory.

I had the disk full of video files. The disk had the windows compression on.

Everything was fine Until I decided to re-format the drive by using the Windows 10 disk management default settings. I enabled compression of disk files and folders, same as before.

After the format, the disk size shows almost the same (well it is the same drive) but it holds ~1TB less amount of files. That means when I try to copy the files I had on it before the format, ~1 TB files can't fit in it.

Why?

What is so special with the disk format that WD did on Element Desktop drive that Windows disk management cannot do the same?

Is there any way to format the disk with WD special parameters, so I can copy all of my files?

Update 1:

Per below screenshot. The newly formatted disk is GPT disk. The WD factory format is MBR. Could this be the reason? Do MBR partitions hold such bigger amount files on a drive same size?

enter image description here

Allan Xu
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    Video will not compress [by regular methods], so that's a red herring. – Tetsujin Jul 14 '18 at 17:06
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    4 TB external should be GPT. Did you mistakenly use MBR instead? – Ramhound Jul 14 '18 at 17:12
  • @Tetsujin, I had the same video files on the original ED factory format too. So we are talking about very same files. – Allan Xu Jul 14 '18 at 17:21
  • @Ramhound. You pointed at an interesting difference, but it is opposite of what you though. Please see my Update. – Allan Xu Jul 14 '18 at 17:30
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    Did you format it as EXFAT or FAT32? You should have used NTFS. – Jamie Hanrahan Jul 14 '18 at 18:14
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    @AllanXu - my point remains, & remains true. Video will not compress by 'regular' methods; it must be re-encoded. It must, therefore, be a red herring. – Tetsujin Jul 14 '18 at 18:47
  • 3.8 TB with a file at is 4 TB unformatted – Ramhound Jul 14 '18 at 22:40
  • “Do MBR partitions hold such bigger amount files on a drive same size?” - No; MBR only allows 2 TB unallocated partitions. – Ramhound Jul 14 '18 at 22:42
  • @Ramhound, see my post here: https://superuser.com/questions/1340179/windows-does-not-recognize-the-drive-partitions-when-i-remove-it-from-an-externa/ – Allan Xu Jul 15 '18 at 02:11
  • if the drive [uses 4KB sector](https://superuser.com/a/866404/241386) then it can access more than 2TB with MBR. On GPT the limit is a lot higher. And as said above, compressing compressed formats like videos, music and images is wrong. If you open properties and check the size on disk then it won't be much different from the original size – phuclv Jul 15 '18 at 04:11

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