Re: "Missing" 1.94 GB on hard drive

Tech-Archive recommends: Repair Windows Errors & Optimize Windows Performance

There are no sectors on today's hard drives.
"Poprivet`" <poprivet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:%23%23GO27RQIHA.4740@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
whitesmith wrote:
Hello all,

The bootable D drive in my PC is a 16.9 GB (formatted)
SCSI. There are only 3 folders on it that contain data:
Documents and Settings (1.37 GB used), Program Files
(1.03 GB used) and Windows (3.34 GB used). I obtained
these figures using folder properties. The sum is 5.74
GB. When I select drive properties, Windows reports 7.68
GB are used -- a difference of 1.94 GB. Quite a big
difference.

Thinking that the disparity might be explained by hidden
or system files I scanned everything on the drive with a
directory command (dir / a:r /a:a /a:s /a:h /a:d *.* /s)
... and got exactly the same figure reported by drive
properties!

Kudos to the person who explains where 1.94 GB is being
sucked up.

You cannot add the math that way.
You are assuming that 1k = 1,000 bytes but not so: 1k = 1,024 bytes to
the disk. Also, Explorer and DIR are not reporting exact sizes: They are
the file sizes rounded off to the nearest sector usage setting of your
disk drive sectors. In other words, if you have 4k sectors on your disk,
a 1 byte file is going to occupy 4,000 bytes because it lives in the
sector and can not share it with any other file. And on and on.
IMO it's time for you to visit Google or your favorite search engine and
read up on the various subjects. Start with NTFS +"Disk File
Structure " . You'll get lots of hits, I'm sure.

This might get you started:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#Capacity_measurements




.

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