Could someone explain the storage discrepancies on my external HD?

[Tommygunn]

I'm trying to work out what is the problem with my Western Digital 1000Gb external harddisk.

I was running out of space and since I was storing some data for a friend I therefore off loaded it onto my friend's computer. The size of this data was in the region of about 10Gb.

I then went and checked the space on my HD and things just didn't match up, never mind the fact that I took off 10Gb of data and there was NOT 10Gb of space left.


First pic below shows the properties after right clicking on the drive icon. What I don't understand is, is where is the 69Gb but it also says that I only have 34.9Mb left.

This second pic show the capacity after going into the drive, highlighting all files and again bringing up the properties. Here it tells me I am using 911/907Gb.

So, I don't understand how all these numbers add up, because they don't. Why am I getting what seems to be random values?
What am I missing, what can I do?

Thanks,
Tom.

 

[Teranius]

Firstly, even though the box for a drive will say 1000Gb, you will usually only have a bit more than 90% of that space. That is because the drive size is actually closer to 1024Gb according to memory conversion theory, and 10% of that space is kept as a buffer.

As to your discrepancy, I'd recommend turning off your "Hide protected operating system files" in the following location: Windows Explorer\Tools\Folder Options\View
Also select "Show hidden files, folders and drives".

After that I think you'll find some hidden virus files and folders, though i can't name them all and I'm not going to try.
If you don't know whether to delete something or not, just post a pic of the files in question.

Basically you then need to either clean the drive with an anti-virus scan or manually delete those files and folders that don't belong.

After you've cleaned it just turn the "Hide protected operating system files" options back on for your own safety, it makes it harder to delete them by accident.

 

[Arris]

Also the file table with details of the data being stored on the disk takes up some disk space as well. If you removed 10Gb of files from the drive you might have to defragment the disk as the space you "freed" when removing the files might not be usable due to high fragmentation ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defragmentation ).