Problems with space remaining on 500Gb internal hard drive - help!

Dinarius

DELL/Vista x64bit.

One of my internal drives contains one folder. If I mouse over it, it says Size:447Gb.

If I mouse over the drive itself it says, Total Size: 465Gb. Space Free: 94.5Mb!!

How can this be?

I would have expected to have about 18Gb remaining.

Thanks.

D.

akamossie

The rest of the size taken for recovery System maybe??

Dinarius

Thanks for the reply.

I doin't think so. The C:drive is seperate from this drive and another 500Gb drive that I have.

I use them for editing digital image files.

The odd thing is that it said 3Gb remaining yesterday, so I dumped a folder containing about 15Gb and then defraged the drive. Therefore, I was expecting about 18Gb free. But, it still said 3Gb (I've now used that up minus the 95Mb I mentioned above)

Very odd!

ED E

Dinarius wrote: »

Thanks for the reply.

I doin't think so. The C:drive is seperate from this drive and another 500Gb drive that I have.

I use them for editing digital image files.

The odd thing is that it said 3Gb remaining yesterday, so I dumped a folder containing about 15Gb and then defraged the drive. Therefore, I was expecting about 18Gb free. But, it still said 3Gb (I've now used that up minus the 95Mb I mentioned above)

Very odd!

If you're using the windows defrag program and there is less than 15% free it may not perform correctly. It sounds like the thing is fragged to hell and its only counting usable space. When you installed the drive did you alter the smallest segment value(cant remember the proper term) from default?

Dinarius

I didn't alter anything.

This was a custom DELL job. It has four drives (C: plus three others)

Bizzarely, the other 500Gb drive says that its total space is only 416Gb, 49Gb less that the problem one claims to have.

I'm very, very confused! :mad:

D.

JonathanAnon

General approach I use is to do a search of all files on the drive to see which ones are taking up the space... You can do this using windows search, use the advanced part to set the file size to "greater than 40000KBs" (i.e. greater than 40Mbs... And see what shows up...

A more user friendly way of doing this is to use a program called TreeSize...
http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml

Dinarius

Thanks.

I can't delete any of the files, so I'm not sure what I'd do even if I find some of them are taking up more space than they should.

These drives fill annually and are then emptied onto external HDs.

I guess that four years of messing with them has screwed up their capacities.

I'll give that freeware a go.

At the end of the year, when I clear them out, would formatting them make a difference?

Thanks.

D.

Dinarius

Update:

Just ran TreeSize. It's giving me exactly the same space remaining numbers as Vista.

D.