External Hard Drive - Folder Behaviour

[JWLD91]

I recently set up a Seagate 2TB Expansion Hard Drive with my 2012 retina macbook pro, which is running El Capitan.

When I try and organise files into folders on the hard drive, it seems to want to create a copy of the file, rather than just moving it into the folder. I have another Seagate hard drive which I bought a few years ago which behaves normally, and just lets me move files around without copying the whole thing.

Does anyone know what could be the reason for this? I've tried to find a dedicated Seagate help forum but there doesn't seem to be one...!

 

[Ebenezum]

How are the drives formatted? You can find out in the Disk Utility.

 

[simonsi]

The drive make doesn't define such behaviour, check how you have formatted it, it IS a single volume yes?

 

[JWLD91]

The only difference I can see is that the new drive says "Owners: Enabled" rather than "Owners: Disabled" - would this have any effect?

 

[simonsi]

Yes I would think so, haven't come across that myself but it certainly sounds like it has the ability to influence the behaviour you are seeing, try changing it?

 

[JWLD91]

Thanks for the replies. Turns out it was just a matter of enabling read & write privileges via Finder > Get Info