Using twice the hard drive space than I'm using

[amftech512]

Hello,

 

I have recently noticed that I have significantly less hard drive space available on my 2 TB exFAT hard drive than I did just recently. Before, Windows said that I was using about 430 GB of space. After downloading a couple of new games, I have noticed that the amount of used space has increased significantly. It now says that I have used 830 GB of space. I know for a fact that the games I downloaded are not 300 GB. Also, selecting everything on the drive and viewing properties for it reveals that I have only used about 450 GB of space, and this is accounting for extra allocation space used by the filesystem. Does anyone have an explanation for this? Any way to get 300 GB back, or have they been sacrificed to the storage gods?

 

Oh and there's a screenshot, in case you wanted to view that.

[Electronics Wizardy]

My guess is that exfat is using much more space due to how it places files, since you have a lot of files on the drive.

Id try ntfs or refs for the drive.

 

 

Basically in a file system every file uses a minnium amount of space no matter whats in it.

 

[amftech512]

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

My guess is that exfat is using much more space due to how it places files, since you have a lot of files on the drive.

Id try ntfs or refs for the drive.

 

 

Basically in a file system every file uses a minnium amount of space no matter whats in it.

 

Is there special software that is required to format a drive using ReFS? Should I get a bootable Linux drive and use GParted? Or does it not make a difference to just use NTFS?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, amftech512 said:

Is there special software that is required to format a drive using ReFS? Should I get a bootable Linux drive and use GParted? Or does it not make a difference to just use NTFS?

what OS's

 

REFS is windows only

 

if you want windows + linux + osx use ntfs

 

If you want to use less space use compression on ntfs. It will also make it faster.

[amftech512]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

what OS's

 

REFS is windows only

 

if you want windows + linux + osx use ntfs

 

If you want to use less space use compression on ntfs. It will also make it faster.

I have all three. Thanks for the info!

[RadiatingLight]

couldn't help but notice the title of this post would mean that you are using infinite space lol.

[vanished]

9 minutes ago, RadiatingLight said:

couldn't help but notice the title of this post would mean that you are using infinite space lol.

 

But seriously, this is very interesting... I've never seen this before and can't imagine how this happened.  That's an insane amount of overhead if that's what it is.

[PianoPlayer88Key]

Is it possible there are files hidden from the Windows user taking up that space?  For example, maybe your user account can't access another user's files, or you're not admin?

Or maybe there are things in the Recycler & System Volume Information folders?  I don't think you can see those from Windows, but boot into Linux & they show.  While there, you could select all & pull up properties, or if you're careful, open Disks or GParted to see what they say about disk usage.

If the drive is OS-level encrypted, though, I guess it might take a good bit more effort to see its contents in Linux.  I lack experience there.

[amftech512]

On 4/17/2017 at 10:06 PM, PianoPlayer88Key said:

Is it possible there are files hidden from the Windows user taking up that space?  For example, maybe your user account can't access another user's files, or you're not admin?

Or maybe there are things in the Recycler & System Volume Information folders?  I don't think you can see those from Windows, but boot into Linux & they show.  While there, you could select all & pull up properties, or if you're careful, open Disks or GParted to see what they say about disk usage.

If the drive is OS-level encrypted, though, I guess it might take a good bit more effort to see its contents in Linux.  I lack experience there.

No, those were all of the files. This is a secondary drive, so no system crap is stored on it. Anyway, I have reformatted the drive using NTFS without any data loss, so I'm happy.

[vanished]

I'm still baffled by this. The actual used space of every file is always rounded up to the next 4 kB (or whatever you set your block size as but this is the default), and if you have many small files this can create quite a dependency between the actual amount of data stored, and how much space it takes up.  That said, Windows displays both those values clearly:

 

So how you've managed to have nearly twice that used on disk is beyond me and something I'd like to solve