OT: 'System Files' eating up HDD space.

farss wrote on 10/25/2005, 6:43 PM

Not a Vegas issue but maybe one of the gurus here can explain this.
I use a lot of removeble HDDs and one odd thing I've noticed is the amount of them used up by System Files varies enormously. On some disks it's as small as 5% yet on others it's more like 20%. All the drives are around the same size and they're all NTFS. My only guess could be that some of them are over the 120GB mark and other aren't, could that have any bearing as the larger drives would use larger addressing.
Bob.

Comments

fldave wrote on 10/25/2005, 6:55 PM

While the drive is connected, I would right click "Recycle Bin", select properties, pick the option to configure each drive separately, then pick the drive. See what the setting is, set it to what you want (most of mine are at 1-2%) click apply. It should free up some space.

I think the default is 10%, so on a total of 1 terabyte system, 100 gig is reserved for recycle bin. Configure each drive separately.

JohnnyRoy wrote on 10/25/2005, 8:01 PM

Also while the drive is connected, right-click on My Computer and in the System properties select the System Restore tab and turn off system restore for those drives. The default is 12% and this can eat up a lot of space too.

~jr

johnmeyer wrote on 10/25/2005, 8:17 PM

The System Restore can eat up a lot of space and should be turned off as JohnnyRoy has already suggested. Only problem is that Windows turns the darn thing back on the next time you connect the drive, so you have to remember to turn it off again.

John_Cline wrote on 10/25/2005, 10:15 PM

By default, NTFS reserves 12.5% of volume size for the MFT (Master File Table) and does not allow writing of any user data in this space, which lets the MFT grow if necessary. When a large number of files are placed on the drive, the MFT can grow beyond the 12.5% reserved space and can become fragmented. When you delete a file, NTFS does not always use its space in the MFT to store new ones, it just marks the old MFT entry as deleted and allocates a new entry for the new file. So, if you have had a large number of files on the drive, even if they have been deleted, the MFT can continue to grow and take up more and more space on your drive. You could always delete the NTFS partition, create a new one and reformat the drive. This will, at least, set the MFT back to 12.5% of the drive's size.

John

B.Verlik wrote on 10/26/2005, 12:44 AM

Check and make sure your DMA is still enabled. I found one of my drives, with the DMA disabled after I know I had set it to enabled I suddenly started getting freeze-ups and couldn't figure out what was wrong..

DrLumen wrote on 10/26/2005, 12:50 AM

Another thing you might want to check is that the larger the drive, the larger each file block will be. Just a an example, I don't remember the exact numbers, but on a smaller HDD (say 10gb), the blocks may only be a 4k minimum block size whereas a 250gb would be like a 16k minimum block size. In essence a 22k file on the smaller drive will actually be 24k (4Kx6), while the same file will be 32k (16Kx2) on the larger drive. While explorer or DOS can show you the exact size (22k) internally it computes from the block sizes. At least this is how it was before NTFS. I don't think it has changed.

Not sure if this is what is happening in your situation; just a thought...

JJKizak wrote on 10/26/2005, 5:44 AM

I have found that while downloading Windows updates it tends to pick a drive at random and in my case it was a SCSI drive "G" and also drive "I" . Windows stacked up a whole bunch of some kind of files on these drives but I never really looked into it.

JJK