Wondering about HD space.

So even after a clean install and putting back all my backups and stuff, it seems my HD has some space that is unaccounted for. I only have one partition that is C and it has a total of 446 GB showing, another hidden partition that i guess is used for recovery is about 20 GB. My HD is a 500 GB one.

Anyway, so I have all my videos/music/documents back in place. I have about 140 GB used up so far but i think about 25 gb of that is unaccounted for. I wanted to know where it is. My program files folder is about 50 gb and my user folder is another 50GB, windows is 13 GB. Every other folder in C is around 500 mb and doesn't add up too much.

Any ideas?

 

That is the normal size for a 500gb hdd because manufacturers use 10^3 [1,000] to define 1 kilobyte - Windows use 2^10 [1024].

 

Hard drives are measured differently than file sizes

First off is that a Megabyte is 1024KB in binary, but only 1000KB as far as hard drive manufacturers count. Secondly you have filesystem overhead, which takes more space that's used to store files (but it's totally necessary). An NTFS formatted 500GB HDD will have about 450GB or so actual usable space.

When a Byte is not a Byte

 

I know that, what i meant was how do i find out where the extra 25 gb went. I'm trying to allocate for all the space I have on the HD. The HD is listed as a total of nearly 460 gb or something like that, that's normal. But i with all my installations and stuff, there should only be like 115 gb used, not 140.

 

System Protection takes up 5% of your HD by default, I believe (right-click on Computer to check).

 

random things filling up will make the HDD less than what it was.

Basically if you install 100GB worth of stuff it will most likely take more 100GB.

 

A 500gb hard drive is only ~465gb because 1 gb = 1024mb. Simply how they market/sell storage devices.

 

Run WinDirStat to tell you where all your space has gone.

I expect it's being used by System Restore for shadow copies of your data. This why a lot of folk switch system restore off.

 

Download VOPT9 defragger. It's free for 30 days and it allows you to see what filetypes are on the disc, by color.

My bet, is system restore, page file, and hiberfile.

 

LOL)))))
OK thats what I say. Hibernation (or sleep, I always forget this) takes place. File hyberfil.sys or smth. takes the same place as you have RAM or about. If you do not use deep sleep push win + R and type pwrcfg -h off and then Enter. It will delete this file.
File Pagefile.sys If you have much Ram - You may (I do this always) decrease it. right button on My comp - Properties. Additional settings. system speed or smth again additionall settings - set virtual memory. If you have 4 GB - write 2024 Mb in both fields, not more.
Change system recovery settings
Delete files which you deleted by pressing Del without shift button
And use Windows 7 manager program to clean temporary files and so on