Missing huge chunk of storage

We may earn a small commission from affiliate links and paid advertisements. Terms

xj0hnx

I wanna be sedated
VIP
So, I have asked on Anandtech, and TechSupportForums, places that are supposed to have the brightest computer minds, well, they are both fail on this. I'll just repost my original posting ...

So one of my 1TB drives that houses system, and movie backups is giving me some odd numbers when looking at used vs free space. The drive has six folders on it, and Windows reports it as having 77.8GB free of 931GB, but when I select all the folders and look at properties it shows only 494GB, and when I take the size of each folder individually and add them up it comes to 658GB. When I add any combination of the six folders I get the 494GB. I have "Show Hidden files, folders, and drives" selected. What is going on here? Any ideas?

I have used WinDirStat to look at the files, and can see the space as "Unknown".

fdrive.jpg


Anandteh thread ... Where is my storage space gone? - AnandTech Forums

TechSupportForum thread ... Where is my storage space gone? - Tech Support Forum

chkdsk /f /r f: did nothing wahtsoever
 
Yes, but only for the C: drive, and I have it limited to 5.74GB and it is currently only using 2.04GB. Page File, and Hibernation are both off.
 
file size and size on disk are 2 different figures that will never add up.

if a 10 kb file needs 2 8kb disk parts to store it, you end up with 16kb used to store that 10 kb.

Defragging can improve this as it will attempt to fill the clusters in the best order.
This is why ntfs is better than fat32.... it has smaller parts to store data which results in less waste.

Otherwise, this is perfectly normal.
 
file size and size on disk are 2 different figures that will never add up.

if a 10 kb file needs 2 8kb disk parts to store it, you end up with 16kb used to store that 10 kb.

Defragging can improve this as it will attempt to fill the clusters in the best order.
This is why ntfs is better than fat32.... it has smaller parts to store data which results in less waste.

Otherwise, this is perfectly normal.

I understand that, but 374 gigabytes missing is not perfectly normal, that's over a third of the drive.
 
If you have a LOT of files, i wouldn't think this is abnormal.
Think about my example

16 for 10

thats 30% waste too.
 
um, wonder if those spaces are bad and its marked by the drive as unusable? maybe look at some SMART data and see if that correlates. i agree that is a huge amount of missing space.

anyway, a great place to as would be xtremesystems. a lot of people there have systems with thousand dollar cpus, RAID controllers and a TB of drives.
 
Check System CP > System Protection

See if you have drive protection turned on. It takes snapshots of change data and doesn't store it in a normal way.

Have you tried Right-Click->Run As Administrator with WinDirStat to see if you get a different report?

Another option would be to boot into a Linux Live CD, mount that partition on the live CD and du -sch * from inside the mount point. Follow the Giant file sizes down the trees and see what you find. This option might be out of your experience range, but it's always there if you get really desperate.
 
Last edited:
You can use space monger to find out where your chunks are missing. It has a visual representation of the files and how much space they take up and it lets you navigate through the filesystem and re adjusts the display so if you go into a folder it visually shows you the files in that folder and how big they are compared to the other files in the folder. it gives you the path name and lets you delete stuff. Download go to the free software tab on this page and scroll down to the 1.4 version that one works just fine.
 
Ok, so this is weird. Yesterday I moved a folder with all my PDF manuals, it's only about 500MB, to the F: drive. Now when all the folders are selected > right clicked > properties, they equal 842GB, and WinDirStat no longer shows a huge missing chuck, only a 300MB piece of unknown. Fucking weird.
 
Back
Top