Forest
There is something fundamentally wrong, but so far I can't figure out what it is. Most of the dialogue above is correct - it's not a difference in compression or units - but the number of rows and columns of your output should not be dramatically different than the input. I can't figure out why that would happen. It almost seems like you have a custom projection, and something in that projection definition is confusing the software - e.g. it automatically figures out that 0.75 feet = 0.228 meters, but then when reprojecting, it "forgets" that the units are changing, so it's outputting 9 identical pixels for every single input pixel (oversampling from 0.75 units to 0.228 units of the *same* units).
A few questions (although I do not believe that these explain the problem)
1) why are your rasters in a database? I typically recommend against that - rather, store as *.tif on disk and access them via a mosaic dataset. Is there a reason you can't do this?
2) Is there a reason that you MUST reproject and duplicate your data? If you use a mosaic dataset, you can project on the fly and not consume disk space or processing time...
3) have you reproduced this with other rasters, or is this one doi\ng something unique?
If you could send me your input file - or a smaller one that is doing the same thing - I'd like to try to reproduce it.
contact me for an upload link - cbenkelman@esri.com
Cody B