Hard Drive Question: Where's all my free space?!

My hard drive has 120gb.

Of course, 15gb is already partitioned for the Vista OS itself.

So, 120-15=105.

Okay. 105gb.

After cleaning out all bloatware such as Napster, Paintshop, the whole bit, I come to find out that all my software/programs combined equals 2.45gb as of right now.

Itunes, I have 1.44gb of stuff.
I have 1.69gb of movies.
Hibernation files - 1.98gb

105gb-2.45gb-1.44gb-1.69gb-1.98gb = 97.44gb


Somehow, I currently have 67.2 gb free of 105gb.
View attachment 9313

Last time I checked, 105-2.45-1.44-1.69-1.98 does not equal 67.2.
Not anywhere near it.

Where the heck did my other 30.24gb go?

 

Two things,

1.) You in all actuality do not have a 120GB Hard Drive the actual formatted drive is less than 120GB it may be like 115GB or so.

2.) Sony probably has a seperate backup program which includes a backup of all the original software.

 

You don't mention which OS you are using, but Vista can use up to 15% of your hard drive for shadow storage (formerly System Restore). Check the article in my signature.

 

15% for shadow storage..So that would approximately bring it down to around 82gbs.

97 x 15% = 82ish.

Yeah, Sony does have a separate backup program. But I doubt it takes a whole 'nother 15 gigs or so to where Im at 67gbs right now.

Deputy, thanks though for that article. I'mma try that later on.

 

Just turn off "System Protection" for your Windows drive/partition and you'll see that space free up

 

Also, keep in mind that the the formatted and partitioned space may be quite a bit less than 105GB, it could be as low as 95GB or so.

95 - .15(95) - 2.45 - 1.44 - 1.69 - 1.98 = ~73GB. The sony backup program could easily be taking up the rest.

If you really want to maximize free space, the only good option is to back up your installed data, do a clean format and install of your OS, and see how much free space you have then. That number (whatever it is) would be the maximum amount of free space you can expect from your HDD.

 

A 120GB harddrive isn't actually 120GB. It's closer to 1112, because of how harddrive manufacturers count. (To them, 1KB = 1000B, to everyone else, 1KB = 1024B. Same goes for MB and GB. So a 120GB harddrive is really 120* 1000^3byte, which is quite a bit less than the 120 * 1024^3 you get with 120 "real" gigabytes)

Hang on, you say you have a separate 15GB partition for Vista? Since the drive is really only 112GB, it shouldn't be possible to have a 15 and a 105 partition in the first place...

 

this in most cases is the problem on my 160 gig vista had 20 gigs for shadow copies and system restores.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=147542

this is a thread about
1 how to delete the files and get back your space
2. then change the amount of hd space vista will be aloud to use for back up and shadow copies

 

Well I bought my laptop with 120gbs of hdd, or so it says. I turn it on and as you can see, it says 105 gb. So I'm guessing 15 gigs is reserved for OS itself.

 

Blackmamba. The posters above are correct. If the specs read 120GB for your HDD, then you'll only be able to see around 93% of that value, which is 111.6GB. Do you know if your notebook has a hidden recovery partition? That could account for the extra 5-6GB's that's missing.

 

Oh right. The OS is on the same partition (inside the Windows folder), it doesn't magically take up space outside the partition.
So the first ~8 GB don't actually exist, because harddrive manufacturers count differently.
The remaining 7 might be a hidden recovery partition, and a bit more is taken up by the partition's metadata (it has to keep a bit of "special" data about the structure of the partition, and some of this at least has to be located outside the partition (because it contains the information necessary to find anything inside the partition)

So anyway, the 105GB partition size sounds more or less right.

Then we just have to account for the missing space within that partition.
As already said, Vista's shadow storage might be responsible for some of it (I don't know the details of how this works, but apparently it grabs 15% of the partition by default. Then there's all the rest of the data about the partition (index of all files on the partition, pointers to wherever they're located, information about size, last accessed times and so on), which are kept in some pretty big hidden files on the partition. (I think the NTFS file system reserves another 10-15% for this)

In short, a lot of disk space has to be set aside to keep track of your files. And a few Vista features will happily grab another big chunk.
The former can't really be avoided, but the latter can be disabled.

 

Gotcha^. So why bother even advertising its 120gb harddrive? Advertising at it's finest...

 

If you look at the bottom of pretty much every tech specs page at Dell or HP, it says "For the purposes of this page 1GB = 100,000KB." They advertise it that way, because it's technically correct. The prefixes Giga, Mega, Kilo, and such, have very well defined meanings in SI. Mega definitely does not mean 1024, it means 10^3, or 1000. In my opinion, it's the stupid computer people and OS makers who insist on calling a megabyte 1024 bytes. If you're going to use base ten prefixes (mega, giga, and so on) then there's no excuse for using powers of two (256, 512, 1024, etc). You just can't mix the two.

 

In your file explorer there should be the information on the drive, after formating. My 80 gig becomes 71 after formating. On my Laptop (Vista) the 160GB becomes 146.... take away the Dell backup partition, Bloated install of Vista, That nifty Media Direct that I have never used, and I still have a whopping 100GB left. (Still feel like I should have more)