Why is my hard drive taking up more space than the sum of its parts?

mobfant

I've just done a clean install of windows and given it a dedicated 15gb partition (which, incidentally, I assume is sufficient?)

However, it reads:

Free Space: 10.9 GB Total Size 14.6 GB

even though everything contained on the C: drive comes to only 1.76 GB. i.e., there's about 2 GB of stuff doing something on my computer but I don't know what. I turned off system restore earlier and that gave me an extra 0.9 GB (bringing it to the current total of 10.9 GB) but how/can I reclaim the remaining space?

Cheers

MadCowMan

Defragmenting the drive might help. It also can vary on the ammount of small files you have on a drive.

NTFS uses a fixed data 'chunk' size , which you specify when the volume if formatted. eg 64k. If a file is less than that, then it'll still take up 64k. The actual storage on disc is always rounded up to the nearest chunk size per file. In this way you can see potentially how files can take up more.

I don't recall if hidden files are shown up either ( this may include your Swap File in certain installs. ) Have you emptied your recycle bin ?

15 Gb is fine for a pure Os partition ( I'd be tempted to put hungrier apps on a seperate volume anyways. )

Is this partition on a seperate spindle ? I'm curious as to what you gains you are after ?

mobfant

My bad, what I meant was a dedicated partition for Windows XP and programs that I install. The reason being that if I need to re-install windows for any reason in the future, I don't have to delete/backup all my photos etc. that are on the separate partition.

it's not fragmented, the recycle bin has been emptied, I think hidden files are included. Partition is on the same spindle. Can't seethe NTFS chunk issue taking up 2 extra GB of extra space. Not sure about the Swap File, how do I find that out?

superscaper

As an aside, I hope you are still backing up your photos/docs etc anyway. Just having separate partitions doesn't help with a hard disc failure. I don't think I've ever experienced a hard disc problem that would have been solved by partitions.

albertross_2

start, search. files and folders, advanced (tick system folder, hidden files, subdirectories), size, at least 10000

mobfant

Thanks for the replies. Found out what it was - fiddling around with control panel, it turns out that it was the virtual memory/paging file. Which leads to the next question - given that I have 1.5gb of memory on my laptop, how much virtual memory do I need, if at all?

Also,I back up to both DVDs and an external hard drive.

MadCowMan

what total drive space do you have ?

as long as you can keep 25% free on your OS drive you'll be fine

BillScarab

Traditionally the recommendation for virtual memory was to set it to 1.5 times physical RAM and in low memory systems up to 3 times.

If you have 1.5 Gb of RAM you probably won't need much, personally I'd set it to 1 Gb to start with.

You can always monitor it and change it if necessary. You can see ho wmuch you are using with task manager or even better download process explorer from Microsoft.

-TangleFoot-

mobfant wrote:

Which leads to the next question - given that I have 1.5gb of memory on my laptop, how much virtual memory do I need, if at all?

That would depend very much on your laptop's workload, which is impossible to determine remotely. If you'd like to know more, I suggest that you read this.