300gb HDD should be empty but shows 69gb of used space. Huh?

I moved all data off my 300gb E drive to another drive for temporary safe keeping until I can swap out this drive for a larger 2tb drive. Odd thing is the 300gb HDD still shows that there's 69gb of used space. But all files on this drive have been deleted so where's 69gb of data? I checked off "show hidden files" & there are 2 folders, System Volume Information & $RECYCLE.BIN (one has 0 bytes & the other 1.17kb of data). I checked Disk Management & it shows E: is 279gb NTFS & healthy. Restarting did help either.

What else needs to be checked?

How sure are you that you have nothing of interest left on the drive?

Have you used an app such as WinDirStat to see what it says?

Have you done a "rescan" and "refresh" in Disk Management?

Has this drive EVER held anything but personal data?

What about checkdisk?

I'd be tempted to just format it, but.........wait for other comments.

ignatzatsonic said:

How sure are you that you have nothing of interest left on the drive?

Have you used an app such as WinDirStat to see what it says?

Have you done a "rescan" and "refresh" in Disk Management?

Has this drive EVER held anything but personal data?

What about checkdisk?

I'd be tempted to just format it, but.........wait for other comments.

Thanks, ignatzatsonic! How's your new case?
Have attached WinDirStat & checkdisk results. I may have used this disc for a dual boot Ubuntu years ago. The scans say there's something there but I've cut & paste to another drive or deleted everything out. It should read zero.

I use Oops Back-up on a different drive but Windows also does a backup & was using the drive in question. According to Oops BU the size would be about what it is showing, 70 to 80Gb. And, everything is backed up on Oops so if a mistake was made it can be recovered.

I've seen explanations for similar situations but do not recall the details.

To the extent you are satisfied it has nothing on it that you care about, I'd reformat it. You could even do a "clean" or "clean all" in Diskpart to wipe it rather than format it. It apparently does have something on it.

I assume your system works fine with this drive literally disconnected and that it is not required to boot or operate Windows?

I'd be mildly concerned something might be wrong with it. You might run the manufacturer's disk utility on it.

I really can't further help. You might hold out for other comments.

The case is A-OK without problems. A couple of mild surprises. See my review on Amazon.

All went well; just formatted. Thanks