Hard Disk Size - Upgrade Needed?

I have a Thinkpad T60. Bought it with 100gb hard disk space, or at least that is what I thought. I go to My Computer and find that the C drive is listed as having 88.2gb of space with about half already taken up. I scoured the entire C drive, conducting searches by file extension, and right click properties on each major folder only to find maybe 5gb tied up in bit torrent movie files, and about 2.5gb on program files. I can't for the life of me figure out where all my disk space is being compromised. How can I break down the 44 or so gb that is taken up? Is there a way to do this? I think there may be hidden files here. Is this likely the case?

Would an upgrade be best if I approach the 3/4 mark in hard disk space taken up? I am looking to maximize the speed of my unit.

 

All new IBMs come with a Recover Partition that takes up about 4.5GB.

 

Tried removing your temporary files or emptying your recycle bin yet? Run the Disk Cleanup wizard.

 

Contrary to what many people believe, free space on a hard drive is about the last thing that slows a computer down (assuming there is enough space on the drive for a swap file and temporary files). There should be almost no speed difference between a drive with 90 gigs free and a drive with 40 gigs free. The only speed difference occurs as data is written further out on the platter, since the OS is installed first 99% of the time this should not make a difference since the files that are used the most are installed at a shorter radius. Even still, you should not be able to notice this difference, it is more theoretical if anything.

What DOES slow a computer down are programs that run all the time. Things like Google Toolbar, Yahoo Toolbar, AOL instant messenger, Limewire, etc all stay resident in memory. Removing programs like this is where you will see your biggest performance increase.

As for your freespace issue- most manufacturers put a system restore partition on the hard drive. Also, the drive's NTFS partition takes up space too, close to 10% of your space is not shown because it is used by the system to keep track of the file system on the drive.

So long story short, don't worry about freespace .

 

From what I heard, when a hard drive gets very low on free space, for instance less than 5% left, it becomes very very slow. Is this true?

Also, remember that a hard drive's advertised size is NEVER the truth. From my experience, the actual hard drive space is always about 93% of the advertised version, so a 100 gb hard drive will actually have 93 gbs to use.

 

On a Windows machine, a fuller hard drive will mean slower performance because the drive would be fragmented like mad and reading/writing files will take much longer as there won't be as many continuous free sections on the hard drive.

 

This is another common myth. A full hard drive does not mean it is fragmented. It is actually quite the opposite. When you start uninstalling programs and deleting files is when you get into serious fragmenting.

 

It depends on the size of the drive. 5% left on a 100 gigabyte drive would be 5 gigs, which is still enough to have a good size swap file and temporary space for different programs. 5% of a 40 gigabyte drive would only be 2 gigs free, which is starting to get low when you talk about having enough virtual memory and temporary storage for different programs.

Hard drive's ARE THEIR ADVERTISED SIZE, it is the file system that makes them appear smaller. An 80 gig drive is 80 gigabytes, NTFS, LFS or whatever file system you choose is what is taking up that other 7-10%.

 

This is great info guys. I tried disk clean up, defragmentation, and checked "compress drive to save disk space" with nominal gains made. Some other questions that came to light as a result of your insightful responses:

What are these file system acronyms? E.g., ntfs, lfs. Do I have a choice in selecting the system, and if so, which is recommended?

The recover partition is good and I suspected that would be a nice chunk of the space taken up. However, 5gb leaves me with more than 30gb unaccounted for. I am still left scratching my head. I just don't want any hidden files (potentially with viruses) residing on my drive. I do have anti-spyware and anti-virus software installed (AVG Free Edition, Spyware Doctor, SpyDoctor). But just know I went to the program manager and found that AVG was being used rarely. I thought it was constantly working to protect me. I am a little wary of viruses and other spyware. Plus, I like to get what I pay for. I do download a fair bit, and don't want to continue running clean ups and watching the space available all the time. Is there no way to drill down on the drive's components? For AVG users, is there a way to ensure that I am being fully protected?

So uninstalling programs frequently leads to fragmenting, which compromises disk space? Could it be that the programs I choose to uninstall are not being completely uninstalled for whatever reason?

 

Ok, just going through all the above points:
First, both Windows and Linux can suffer from defragmentation. It's just something that's impossible to avoid. Linux file systems are a bit better at organizing files to minimize it when there's lots of free disk space, but that doesn't mean no fragmentation occurs, or that there's no performance hit from it.
Second, if your drive is almost full, files will easily get fragmented (The less disk space is free, the fewer *big* chunks of space are free. If there are no big enough chunks, newly written files have to be squeezed into a larger number of smaller chunks. That's what fragmentation *is*, and it's impossible to avoid, especially when your drive is almost full.

Windows as a whole doesn't get slower when there's little free space. But some I/O operations may get slower, because of the excessive fragmentation. Older files are unaffected because they were written continuously back when that was possible to do, but when writing new files, it'll be a lot slower due to the need to jump back and forth on the platter to find a few free bytes to write to. The same goes when reading newly written files.

Harddrives are exactly their advertised size, but with two caveats.
First, their size is measured with 1000 MB = 1 GB, where normally, size is measured with 1024 MB = 1 GB. So a 80GB harddrive is exactly 80 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 byte
But when we talk about 80 GB of disk space, we usually mean 80 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024. So yes, a harddrive only has roughly 93% of the "expected" disk space, but they are exactly as big as measured.

Also, the file system takes a lot of space to itself, which may make your harddrive appear smaller.

With this much space unaccounted for, I'd say there's something wrong. A third of your HD capacity shouldn't just disappear.

AVG is running constantly (unless you disable it). The program manager thingy is just confused, as always. Ignore it.

Fragmentation doesn't compromise disk space, it just makes reads/writes slower.

And the file systems?
NTFS is the only *proper* file system supported on Windows. It also supports FAT and FAT32, but those suck. Don't use them.

Linux has a whole range of file systems available, but since you're running on Windows, that doesn't matter.

Anyway, to find your missing disk space:

Search by file extension? Why? What have file extensions got to do with your disk space?
Just right click on each folder on the C drive, go to properties, and see how much disk space is taken up by each. When you've found a big offender, open that folder and do the same on each subfolder inside it.