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Used hard drive space?

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5 replies

by cookieorc

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I have a Western Digital 160gig HD. My hard drive reports that 61.2gigs are currently in use... When I open up the C Drive and select all the directories below that(with all hidden and system files selected). It says that I am only using 42gigs... I also used a 3rd party utility that shows that is the total amount being used.

I do not believe that my HD is failing... I ran chdsk... The drive seems fine...

5 replies

by oh smeg

Most likely. You need to remember that the HDD uses space a bit differently to other storage devices and that the OS particularly a Windows OS has a lot of Temp files stored on the HDD while the OS is running that do not appear as used space on the HDD.

If you want to check your HDD download the makers Testing Utility from WD and test the drive from here

http://tinyurl.com/4fd3

by cookieorc

I did run ccleaner to clean up my temp files. I just thought 20gigs of "temp files" would be a little extensive. Although this is Vista Ultimate...

by oh smeg

But Check Disc isn't a valid Drive Tester. You need to use the HDD makers testing utility to properly check your HDD. Nothing supplied by M$ will ever be fully accurate and could not be considered as the Finial Say on anything. The Disc Makers Testing Utility which generally runs in a Quasi DOS Mode is different and is the definitive test.

As for slack space on the bigger drives this can get very large quickly if you don't regularly run Defrag from within Windows. That may clear up some space but if you haven't run it regularly it may take several runs to show any improvement.

Col

by kalelg

thought this could help.
I found that on a fresh install of Vista, some times it starts eating disc space and the file number does not increase; this is due to how windows handles disc protection, try to disable windows disc protection from computer properties, this cleared about 15 to 20 gigs on some computers I worked on.
hope this helps

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