Hard Drive Space Issue

[tmacairjordan87]

I've been having a "disappearing" space issue on my hard drive for at least a week now (at least that's when I noticed...I may have had this since I built my computer in November). I have a 1TB drive.

Sometimes I will lose space for seemingly no reason. I have ccleaner to get rid of all the junk stuff but it doesn't always restore the space I counted as missing, and I didn't download anything in that time frame. It seems to happen most when my monitor sleeps or if I have a screensaver on. For example, today I left for about an hour, came back and upon exiting a screensaver and checking I noticed I lost around 4gb.

Here are things I've done to try and resolve this with no success:

1) I've shut off pagefile (freed up around 6.7gb) and I deleted that hiberfil file (another 5-6gb)

2) Ran just about every virus scan I could think of in safe mode and normal mode. MSE, Norton (my standard one), AVG, Malwarebytes...all came back with nothing.

3) Downloaded ccleaner as mentioned earlier and use it every night (probably unnecessary, but whatever)

4) Deleted all but the most recent system restores, and made sure windows backup was off...it was.

5) Downloaded WinDirStat and ran in administrator mode.

WinDirStat did pick up something intriguing to me. First time I checked "show unknown files" it brought up a ~2gb file. I ignored it at first but after I lost that previously mentioned 4gb or so I checked again and it is now 7.5gb. However, it just tells me it's there but not what it is or where it is.

I don't consider myself a very tech-sound person (I didn't even know about pagefile or hiberfil before I investigated this) so I'm kind of out of ideas now short of using DBan to wipe the drive and start over in case I have a deeply embedded virus or malware that the scans didn't pick up.

Obviously that's my last resort, so if anyone could help here I'd greatly appreciate it!

 

[corkyg]

A major unseen space gobbler are Temporary Internet Files. They are anything but temporary, and are cumulative. Every time you go on line, they get added to.

Another unseen user of disk space is System Restore and its Shadow Copies.

But - with a 1 TB drive, why the concern about relative minutia?

 

[tmacairjordan87]

Yeah ccleaner gets rid of all the temp files (or is supposed to at least) and I only have 1 system restore.

That 7.5gb mystery space I was talking about came back late last night. No explanation other than it just...reappeared as free space. I didn't turn the computer off or restart it, it just reappeared as I was watching a movie on my computer.

I admit I'm being a bit obsessive over it but if there is/was a problem I like to cut it off asap.

 

[pete1229]

It's probably the drive indexing in windows using that space. Drive indexing is used to find files more quickly in search. The amount of space used is roughly equivalent to the amount of RAM in your system. As to why it seems as if the disk space usage appears only occasionally I cannot say. But if you ever sat at your pc while it was supposedly idle and saw allot of disk activity (HDD activity light) for no apparent reason, it was more then likely indexing the drive, which can by the way, be disabled if you choose, but keep in mind it will slow your searches down quite a bit.