# UFS vs FAT32



## hirohitosan (May 27, 2010)

Hi there.
I have an external HDD formatted Fat32. I copied from from that HDD a lot of files to my FreeBSD box with copy command. 

```
$ cp -R /mnt/hdd-extern/backup/FAT32-formatted/ /disk/data/backup/UFS-formatted/
```
No error messages. At the end on my Fat32 source the directory has 268G and on my UFS destination I have 237G

```
$ du -hs /disk/data/backup/UFS-formatted/
237G    /disk/data/backup/UFS-formatted/
$ du -hs /mnt/hdd-extern/backup/FAT32-formatted/
268G    /mnt/hdd-extern/backup/FAT32-formatted/
```
This is because of different file system or something goes wrong when I copied the files?

thanks


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## SirDice (May 27, 2010)

It's because they're different filesystems. FAT32 is not really efficient especially with large volumes as the block sizes get rather big.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems


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