Over 150GB of data uncounted for

[robert112]

I have an external terabyte drive that is used to store files on. There are only 375.6GB of actual data on the drive but 533.7GB is showing up as being used. So there is about 150GB of magic fairy dust hiding somewhere on the drive. I have tried defragging, ccleaner, windirstat (treesize), changing the recycle bin size, and checking for weird partitions, but there is nothing out of the ordinary. There are no viruses or anything like that and I just installed Windows 7 32bit. And this has nothing to do with the gigabyte gibibyte conversion. Total space is showing up as 931GB and I expect that, but I mean almost 160GB of that total is uncounted for.

Would having indexing on or the allocation size have anything to do with this?

 

[whs]

I suggest 2 actions:

1. Run WinDirStat. That will tell you exactly whats on your disk (but not the shadowstorage).
2. For the shadowstorage, go to Start > Computer > right click and go to Properties > System protection (in the left pane on top) > System protection tab > highlight the drive in question > configure > and what is the number behind "current usage" in the second half of the window?

 

[robert112]

WinDirStat tells me there are 375.5 GB of files and the System Protection is turned off with 0 bytes currently used.

 

[A Guy]

Welcome to Seven Forums robert112. You can also try this small, free program:

Tree Size Free

A Guy

 

[cluberti]

It could actually be MFT taking up that space as well - if the drive wasn't properly aligned and is using the wrong cluster sizes for the types of files you're storing (size-wise), you can waste a TON of space in MFT (which won't show up in a disk usage tree for apps using Win32 APIs to get disk usage info, but would show up as used space nonetheless).

 

[robert112]

Just did a CHKDSK and my allocation size is 512 where needs to be 4096. I don't know if this is causing an issue but needs to be fixed. I'm about to back up and format the drive right and see how that goes.

 

[robert112]

Changing the allocation size to 4096 fixed it. Speeds up defragging too.

 

[A Guy]

Changing the allocation size to 4096 fixed it. Speeds up defragging too.

Good catch, thanks for sharing

A Guy