Missing hard drive space

TheBazman

Hi folks

My hard drive is 500GB, and when I look at my Disk Management it says 465GB NTFS so lets assume it only 465GB (worst case). When I look at properties it says that I have 155GB free, so worst case scenario I am using 310GB according to this. I have used TreeSize to check what it is being used on and it says that I am only using 270GB. So it seems that I am missing somewhere between 40GB and 75GB on my hard drive.

I am using Vista, and I have done a disc cleanup, defrag etc

Any idea whats going on?

Cheers

hobochris

Most hard drive makers measure: 1MB = 1000.

Where as your OS does it the proper way: 1MB = 1024.

a bit of a con but it could be argued either way is right.

TheBazman

But doesn't that just account for an error of 2.4% whereas I am missing something north of 10%?

GarIT

A hard drive cant just work, it needs to be formatted, and that can take up massive ammounts of space, 10% sounds normal, ive hard of one being something like 17% before.

ozmo

Each file has a mininum space it takes up - the amount varies.

If you have tens of thousands of files - all that wasted space at the end of each file adds up.

Do a RightClick - Properties on a folder - and you will see what the "Size" and "Size on disk" is.

Also - some pc's have a hidden partition - with a copy of the windows disks stored on them (and a lot of empty space also) - so you can do a complete restore of the pc. You can see the partitions in "Disk managment" app in the Manage app in the control panel.

maki

hobochris wrote: »

Most hard drive makers measure: 1MB = 1000.

Where as your OS does it the proper way: 1MB = 1024.

a bit of a con but it could be argued either way is right.

It's not quite a con. The hard drive manufacturers are technically correct.
1MB, with mega being the prefix, under the SI system of metric units means 1,000,000 bytes.
Windows uses Mebibytes (MiB) which is 1,048,576 bytes, yet incorrectly labels it as a Megabyte.

This is why it seems you're loosing a few gigs of space, but you're actually getting exactly as advertised.

hobochris

maki wrote: »

It's not quite a con. The hard drive manufacturers are technically correct.
1MB, with mega being the prefix, under the SI system of metric units means 1,000,000 bytes.
Windows uses Mebibytes (MiB) which is 1,048,576 bytes, yet incorrectly labels it as a Megabyte.

This is why it seems you're loosing a few gigs of space, but you're actually getting exactly as advertised.

As I said could be argued either way.

metric system or binary derivative.

While I see valid arguments for both ways, I have a background in software development which would sway me towards using the binary based measure.

ricman

make sure its formatted in ntfs ,click propertys drive c,External drives are very cheap now,you should have anything important backed up anyway.Any new pc will have at least 200gig drive in it.
1000 gig costs around 70euro on average.As posted before,many pcs have a hidden restore partition ,to restore the os .

Capt'n Midnight

1024*1024*1024 = 1073741824 so the marketing gimps have lied by 7.37%

you also have to remember that partitions are usually rounded down to the nearest cyliinder and one cylinder is used for the partition table

NTFS has a MFT$ hidden area for directory structure (and small files but your brain would explode if you start thinking about it) , yes file names and folder names take up space , and so does the backup copy

also when files are stored in a drive they take up full allocation units , even if there is only one byte in an allocation unit a full one is used

also windows hides lots of system files, and the pagefile, system restore alone can use up to 10% of the drive BTW


As long as you havve 10-15% free space on a drive it should not appreciably slow down (though files at the start of the drive will be faster because of higher i/o and lower seek times)

Kinetic^

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

marketing gimps

This is who you have to blame. As soon as they heard the largest number in relation to the hard drive, they jumped all over it.

TheBazman

ricman wrote: »

make sure its formatted in ntfs ,click propertys drive c,External drives are very cheap now,you should have anything important backed up anyway.Any new pc will have at least 200gig drive in it.
1000 gig costs around 70euro on average.As posted before,many pcs have a hidden restore partition ,to restore the os .

I do have all the important stuff backed up (a couple of times).

ricman

IF you have a small hard drive, turn off system restore,or reduce the amount of space it uses ,it can be adjusted ,use x per cent of drive space,If its a desktop pc,its easy to put in drive as drive e, set jumper to s,slave.

Kinetic^

Could be a dodgy partition, might need a format and re-install.