[X4U] problem copying external HD to external HD

[David Ledger]

At 00:33 -0400 18/9/10, Doug Metzler wrote:
Hello,
I am trying to consolidate the contents of several smaller external HDs onto
an external 2T drive and am having a strange "memory leak" sort of problem.
The process is filling many GBs of the internal drives of the two Macs I have
tried this with.  Details: source HD is an old firewire 400 Lacie 120G drive,
destination is Western Digital usb 2 drive formated for 32 fat, two computers
are an iMac 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo and a 17 inch MBP with same chip, both
  run 10.5.8.  For instance, I am now transferring a 78G folder and have
transferred 7.7G of it, but the available space on the internal iMac drive has
gone from 236G to only 192G!  Something is taking up far more space on
the internal drive than has been actually transferred between the two
externals.  I could imagine that an internal directory pointing to the
contents of the external drives might be expanding but how could
that be larger than the actual files?  The additional space is returned
on a restart but I don't know anyway to free it up short of that.
Any thoughts or help would be appreciated.

How are you doing the copy? Is it a Finder drag or a Terminal 
command? If the latter, what command?
Is the data appearing on the WD drive?

Copying data directly from one external drive to another should have 
no effect on the internal drive other than maybe some swap space for 
the copying process if you're short on memory.

David


-- 
David Ledger - Freelance Unix Sysadmin in the UK.
HP-UX specialist of hpUG technical user group (www.hpug.org.uk)
david.ledger at ivdcs.co.uk
www.ivdcs.co.uk