25GB Missing From Drive

[r2o2]

Hi, I am just wondering what's up with my backup drive - a Maxtor USB2 HDD, model 3200, 500GB cap

Adding up my files on it totals 112GB, but disk properties shows 'Used Space' = 137GB

Its not a major problem just now, but I am very curious as to how the extra 25GB is being used up.

I am on Win7 and System Restore is switched off on this drive, there is no page file on the drive, hidden/protected files are SHOWN, CHKDSK found blocks marked as allocated on the drive but were actually unused and it reported it fixed this, and recycle bin has been emptied

Any ideas, welcome thanks!

 

[Engineer]

Are there lots of files, especially small ones? There is a minimum cluster size used no matter how small the file or the overlap is and I suspect that you have lots of small files that are taking a minimum cluster size or barely overlapping into the next cluster therefore taking all of that cluster for use but only using a small portion of it with real data.

 

[r2o2]

Yes I have one folder in particular with > 100,000 fairly small files

Though I thought Size v Size On Disk showed this up this extra disk space used due to clustering - however it reports 23.7GB v 24.1GB in Properties, not a big difference.

In any event I deleted ALL the files from the drive, and find it reports 25GB used !

I have now reformatted it, and it looks a lot healthier, with only 114MB used, so it remains a mystery what was using up that 25GB.

 

[Engineer]

Hidden file(s) possibly?

I would have said recycle bin but since you deleted all of the files and it still showed 25GB as being used, I would guessed it's not the recycle bin.

Don't know at this point and guess it doesn't matter now.

Glad it's corrected.