Perhaps this is what you're seeing?

1) Marketing numbers : 120G on the box means 120 x 1000 x 1000 x 1000 bytes, while you may be thinking 120G means 120 x 1024 x 1024 x 1024. Thats about 9 GBytes on each driver right there, 18 total.

2) Hidden things on the drive, like "System Volume information" that don't show up in windows explorer by default

3) packing inefficiency - say disk space comes in 4 KB chunks, and you have 2KB of information, then the remaining 2KB is unavailable.

If you are using Windows XP, the System Restore option may be reserving space for those drives.

guys,
thanks for your replies. I think I've turned off System Restore on both my video drives, and drive indexing as well. I drove to a local Best Buy and bought a 160Gig Maxtor external drive and will try to move all files to that drive, formating the video drives, and then moving the stuff back.

Maybe it's the cluster size thing. Are the clusters supposed to be as small as possible? I think i've left them at default.

bombaj

P.S. Maybe others will have a solution still?

Windows formats ntfs and reserves 12.5% for the Master File Table.
Goodbye space.

No - if you are using the drive as strictly for video, the large files are better suited to large cluser sizes. I've formatted my video drives with 64k allocation units.

"For some reason, both have 20-30 gigs of space missing."

How did you determine this? What dialog box is telling you this?

If you right-click on the drive letter for one of your drives (in Windows Explorer), you should get a dialog that shows:

Used space: 95,497,945,088  88.9 GB

Free space: 28,021,051,392  26.0 GB

Capacity:  123,518,996,480 115   GB

The difference between the first and second number on each line is due to the differences in how disk sizes are computed and has already been mentioned earlier in this thread.

The above numbers are for my NTFS 120 GB drive.

In Windows Explorer, if you click on Tools -> Folder Options, and then click on the View tab, you can change which files are shown when you look at your disks. If you click on "Show hidden files and folders" and then clear the check in "Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)," you will see ALL the files your disk. Of course, once you can see them, you can accidentally move or delete them, which would be really BAD, so after you have looked around to see where the "missing" space might be, you should probably set these back to their defaults.

If you computer has crashed, it is possible that you might have unclaimed file fragments. This used to happen all the time with Win9x and FAT32 file systems. I don't know whether it is a problem with NTFS. However, you can fix this problem, if it does exists, by right-clicking on the drive letter, and then selecting Properties, and then the "Tools" tab. Under "Error-checking" and then select "Automatically fix file system errors."

I have had the similar problem several times. I've had it suggested that it could be because you have a Norton Protected Recycle Bin on your machine but I'm not convinced. My problem seems to happen only when I'm trying to delete really large files. I'm more inclinded to think that the problem might be with Windows XP. But if it is or not I have resorted to always removeing large files by using Norton's WIPE INFO utility. If you have the room on another drive do whats been suggested transfer all of the remaining data to another partition & then reformat the problem one.

Firstly IF you have Norton Protected Recycle Bin GET RID OF IT - it hogs space and why do you need it (do you delete files late at night when pissed?)

THEN run check disk. This will check the disk integrity and restore lost cluster, or the NTSF equivalent. I think in XP you need run from the command prompt. START>RUN>chkdsk and I think it runs when you reboot. Then do as you were told to get the disk properties and post them here for us all to see. However as this has happened to two seperate NEW disks I suspect the problem (if you have one, some here obviously doubt that) is software related. Did you set up the BIOS right? Some BIOS's limit usable disk size. Did you run the manufactoresr instalation disk- normally these thing have a diagnostics that runs after the installation. Do you have the Master/Slave/Type switches on the disks right?

Keep us posted.

Hey guys,
OK, so I moved the contents of those problem drives onto the external MAXTOR FW drive. Reformatted the drives. Moved the stuff back and sure enough, I was able to reclaim at least 20 gigs on each drive.

Before that, I have tried running CHKDSK, looking for any "invisible" files/system files, etc. I also downloaded a little utility that showed me exactly how much space was being used by the vaious directories.

When formatting, I used 64kb clusters like someone suggested here. Not sure what I had before.

As an aside...anyone else using Maxtor external drives? Are they reliable? I will be putting these 2 120 gig drives either in external FW boxes or maybe into the HD cages/trays. I plan to get 2 higher capacity drives for video.

I guess what I would like to know is that what are your preferences for FW case brands?

thanks,
bombaj

I discovered on Sunday that Prerender files are kept on your hard drive (Probably everyone else in the world knows). I had some from over a year ago and was able to clear almost 6 gb from the hard drive.

If you have not already done so I would recommend checking that.

How about a new thread on that firewire case brand question?

When formatting, I used 64kb clusters like someone suggested here. Not sure what I had before.

Since you've already done this, don't worry about it. Some people recommend doing this on drives that will store mostly video, but I don't think it helps anything, and using something other than the

If you do a search on Google, you will quickly find from Microsoft and other sources that using cluster sizes other than the usual XP NTFS default of 4kb can cause some utilities to malfunction. However, converting from your 64kb cluster size back to 4kb is not worth the hassle. Just file away my comment, and if you have a problem with a disk utility, you'll know why.

The problem most people have -- and this may have been at the root of your original issues -- is that when you upgrade from a FAT32 to an NTSF file system using the Windows convert.exe command, Windows chooses 512 byte cluster sizes. I found out the hard way about this, and only fixed it a few months ago (on a computer I had been using for 18 months). It was a major PAIN to change the cluster size.

nice thread...

big cluster sizes for a video drive is the right idea, because even if the defrag utility won't work with big clusters, you'll be defragging every time that you delete the project avi's.

one critical thing to watch out for when going to a big drive is the version of Atapi.sys that you have on your computer: http://www.shortfamilyonline.com/tech/windows/windows-big-hard-drives.php

wrt firewire drive cases... if it doesn't have a fan in it, i won't use it.