The only time I have seen two identical tables behave differently came down to the fact the data was not stored identical between the two tables. The data distribution was different even though the data was the same.
Would you mind explaining why should that make any difference?
To answer your question, no it's not stored any differently. Both of the tables have the data stored ordered by the bigint PK. The rows are ordered and match between the two tables based on the identity column.
You're forgetting about fragmentation. The old table is likely to be fragmented and the new table is not. Even with exactly the same indexes and rows, the two tables are not the same.
Drew
J. Drew Allen
Business Intelligence Analyst
Philadelphia, PA