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Strange Harddrive storage problem

N

NebulaD

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 17, 2005
Messages
215
ok my friend has a 200gb hard drive aprox 186gb usable. When he clicks properties it says he has 164GB used but when he goes into the drive, and select all the contents, and hits properties, it says he's only using 147GB (size on disk) somewhere down the road he is losing almost 20gb of storage. Now this drive doesnt have windows installed on it its just used for games and things.

Any help would be appreciated
 
I can't remember exactly why, but as far as I know this is normal. It has something to do with rounding. My work computer for example has a similar discrepency of 4gb (it's a much smaller drive).
 
NTFS automatically reserves ~10% of the disk space for the MFT, the master file table.
 
NebulaD said:
ok my friend has a 200gb hard drive aprox 186gb usable. When he clicks properties it says he has 164GB used but when he goes into the drive, and select all the contents, and hits properties, it says he's only using 147GB (size on disk) somewhere down the road he is losing almost 20gb of storage. Now this drive doesnt have windows installed on it its just used for games and things.

Any help would be appreciated
Click to expand...

It's because your drive is divided up into clusters. If your data leaves a cluster not all the way full, you get slack. That's why it's better to use smaller clusters so you don't end up with so much wasted space.

For example, your drive is using 32k clusters and you have a file that is 16k. You end up wasting 32k - 16k = 16k.

Since FAT 32 came out, cluster size is usually 4k. I think the default NTFS is 4k, but still, if you have many many small files, all those partially filled clusters add up.
 
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