75GB hard drive, 10GB Unaccounted for?

[acoustictech]

Hello, I have a shared network drive that has a 75GB capacity. There are only 3 folders in there that take 30GB, 30GB, and 1GB. The problem is that windows explorer tells me that 72GB are used up. Any clue where the other 10GB are? I haven't defragmented in a while but I can't see that fixing 10GB worth of missing space. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Allen

 

[rvnguy]

aenriquez,

Put on your math hat.

75GB equals 75 billion bytes

1MB = 1024 bytes

1GB = 1,000 MB or 1,024,000 bytes

your 72GB = 1,024,000 times 72 or 73,982,000,000 bytes

Basically, this is well within reason.

You have not specified the HD format type, but if FAT32, then the smallest addressable block would be by default, for a 70+ GB drive, 32KB. As similar condition exists in NTFS with a smaller impact.

So if your folders contain many files, each files will generate what is called "slack space". This is space that a file requires to be stored.

Example: a 65KB file would consume 3X32KB or 96KB.

So propogate this out to 1-5 thousand files and the slack becomes an issue.

Hope this assists in clearing this up.

rvnguy
"I know everything..I just can't remember it all

 

[cdogg]

rvnguy,

This is a small detail, but actually 1GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes (1024 ^ 3).


Allen,

Hard drive manufacturers sell you drives advertising gigabytes, but they are not "true" gigabytes. They willingly accept the fact that one gigabyte = 1,000,000,000 bytes, but from the math above, you can see why that's not true. That's 73,741,824 bytes that aren't accounted for in every gig they sell you.

So what they gave you was 75,000,000,000 bytes. Divide that by 1,073,741,824 (which is the true size), you get 69.85 GB.

That's not quite the loss of 10 that you considered, but realize that some space is lost when partitioning (tables for each take up space), and as rvnguy showed, there are other reasons for some small amounts to go unaccounted for.


Hope that helps and doesn't seem too technical![tab]

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
[tab][navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884

 

[acoustictech]

Makes complete sense. Thanks for the help!