filled hard drive?

MNJ wrote on 1/6/2003, 8:45 PM

My 60 Gig hard drive, which I only use for video, seems to be more full than it should be (if that makes any sense). When I click the properties in WinExplorer, it says used space 47.2 gigs and free space 8.64 gigs (total 55.8, on a 60 gig hard drive - what's up with that?) However, when I add up all the directory files individually they add up to only about 36 gigs! This is after I defragged last night.

Can someone tell me why what's going on here, or point to some web site that explains this. There's something obviously that I don't understand.
FYI - I'm running WinME, with FAT32 on the drive.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 1/6/2003, 9:27 PM

Drive sizes are definately a grey area ... along the lines of voodoo and income tax statements. Part of the discrepancy is that some of the listings assume that a kilobyte is 1,000 (10^3) bytes and some assume 1,024 (2^10) bytes, and you usually don't know which is being used. Since a gigabyte is a kilobyte x a kilobyte x a kilobyte, try taking the 55.8 number and multiplying it x 1024 x 1024 x 1024, then dividing by 1000 x 1000 x 1000. You get 59.9 which is just about 60.

As far as the drive being fuller than the sum of the files, this is due to cluster sizing on the drive. The drive is divided into descrete blocks, often 512 bytes each, and these blocks are grouped together into clusters, usually 8 blocks each. To increase efficiency of reading and writing to the drive, clusters are usually never broken up when storing files. 8 blocks of 512 bytes is 4096 bytes. So if your file is 3500 bytes, it will still take up 4096 bytes of space on the drive. If it's 4100 bytes, then it will use up two clusters for 8192 bytes. On average half the last cluster will be wasted. The amout of used space on your drive is the total clusters used. The sum of the file sizes is the total of bytes actually being used by the files, not counting the wasted space.

Now, considering that the wasted space is more of a concern with smaller files, and you use this drive only for video which generally consists of huge files, your discrepancy shouldn't be that big. My guess is that you probably have some FAT errors. When is the last time you ran scandisk on that drive?

MNJ wrote on 1/7/2003, 12:11 AM

You guessed right, that most of the files are rather large. Most the video files...even the short clips...are at least 80 MB, but many are 300 MB and the final vegas movies are 1 to 3 gigs each, so I didn't expect there to be a lot of wasted space.

I'm not sure when the last time I ran scan disk...but I will now. Thanks for the info.

BillyBoy wrote on 1/7/2003, 12:24 AM

Also sometimes the obvious... Have anything in your recycle bin? Hard drive space isn't returned until you 'empty the trash'

MNJ wrote on 1/7/2003, 12:34 AM

You were right. Before I saw your post about emptying the recycle bin, I ran scan disk (drive had no errors) and then ran Norton CleanSweep...and that was the solution (and I came back on to re-post) So, now my 60 Gig disc has 36 gig of file and 24 gigs of free space. Live and learn. Thanks guys.

pb wrote on 1/7/2003, 12:36 AM

I've found through hard experience that one should deem a hard drive full once it reaches about 80% capacity. After that you get into fragmentation and other grief. Only major long form job I ever did with Vegas took up almost all of my 60 gig firewire drive (had the pre-renders on there as well). To finish I had to delete all prerenders and change the prerender directory to the physically separate D drive. Same thing with our DC1000 which has four SCSIs: stop at 80%.