Re: Harddrive used memory
From: Tim Slattery (Slattery_T_at_bls.gov)
Date: 04/14/04
- Next message: StevenUK: "RE: DISK CLEANUP"
- Previous message: Larry Miller: "Reserved words?"
- In reply to: Hardy: "Harddrive used memory"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ]
Date: Wed, 14 Apr 2004 09:01:51 -0400
"Hardy" <anonymous@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:
>Hi
>
>I have a 120 gig external hard drive which is of course displayed
> as 111 GB in Windows I don't know why but I know that is normal.
> Now the problem.
That's simply the difference between decimal gigabytes (10**9 bytes =
1,000,000,000 bytes) and binary gigabytes (2**30 bytes=1,073,741,824
bytes). Manufacturers quote disk sizes in decimal GB, the software
uses binary GB. 120 (decimal) GB = 111.76 (binary) gigabytes.
>When I check the properties of my drive it says that 99 GB are used.
>But when I click properties of all my folders including recycled,
> system volume information and _restore it tells me all those folders are 62 GB.
Ever heard of slack space? Disk space is allocated in units called
"clusters" or "allocation units". The size of those units is
determined by the file system you're using (FAT32 tends to use bigger
units than NTFS), and by the size of the partition. If you have a
single FAT32 partition covering that entire disk, then the cluster
size would be 32,000 bytes (or maybe 64,000 bytes).
Any file, no matter how small, will occupy at least one cluster. All
files end up wasting some space in their last cluster. The missing
37GB are probably being lost to slack space. (Some goes to control
structures: directories, mapping tables, things that the File System
uses to keep track of what's where.)
-- Tim Slattery MS MVP(DTS) Slattery_T@bls.gov
- Next message: StevenUK: "RE: DISK CLEANUP"
- Previous message: Larry Miller: "Reserved words?"
- In reply to: Hardy: "Harddrive used memory"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ]
Relevant Pages
|
|
