git repository size vs. subversion repository size

Last night I decided to see what storage size differences I might see between an svn repo and a git one. So I imported a highly used subversion repository into git and was shocked to see how huge the git version was. I used a repo that has a lot of branches and tagged releases just to make sure importing into git would in fact keep all of the history. It did keep the history, but the total disk usage was very different:

$subversionbox # du -hs ./my_sample_website/ 67M ./my_sample_website

$localhost # du -hs ./git-samplesite/ 3.6GB ./git-samplesite/

Here are the steps I took (locally):

mkdir git-samplesite-tmp cd git-samplesite-tmp git-svn init http://subversion.myco.com/my_sample_website --no-metadata git config svn.authorsfile ~/Desktop/users.txt # mapped svn users to git users git-svn fetch git clone git-samplesite-tmp git-samplesite

I did this based on reading the documents in the git wiki, so I assumed they were "best practice." Did I do something wrong? If this is a normal amount of storage need increase, we'd likely not move to git based on the need for new hardware alone.

Any help would be appreciated.

Sean