Inspiron 9300 - Lost Hard Disk space

Question

Hello. I just bought a new Dell 9300 Inspiron laptop, with a 60 Gb hard disk (to be more precise, it is 57 gb...). There are 3.5 Gb taken for the restauration stuff, so i'm left normally with 54 Gb to use. In windows explorer, I see that there is 8.5 Gb taken by all the files. But if I summ all the sizes of the files, I find approximately 4,5Gb! I even used a program, treesize, which tells the size of any folder, and it tells me also that I just have 4,5Gb of files... And it has nothing to do with the pagefile.sys, or the hibern.sys, they are approximately 500 mb ( I still have 256 mb of Rams...) So where did the 4 Gb disappeared? Thank you for your answers in advance.

wissamms · Answer

In fact the problem was that the extra files were hidden in the 'System Volume Information' folder, and it was a restauration point... I deactivated it, and it deleted the files, I got my 3,5 Gb back!

ejn63 · Answer

The size of a file isn't the whole story. NTFS doesn't manage by individual file - it manages by cluster, and the minimum cluster size is often larger than an individual file. When it is, the slack space is in use, though it's not filled by the file.

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/ntfs/archCluster-c.html

Storage, Drives & Media

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