Invisible Disk Space?

rvg90 · May 27, 2013

First it's worth to mention that i discovered bad sectors in my HDD with the WD tool but i didn't really bother to fix it as i don't have any external drives to store my files and avoid that tool wiping some of them. Today when i started up my PC i noticed that drive C is running low on space and when i calculated everything inside including hidden file the total was 34 gb out of 50gb so there is about 12 gb that are occupied but i can't find out by what... is that normal?

avjguy2362 · May 27, 2013

Depends of your OS, but you can use Disk Manager, to see if there is a small space assigned for a boot partition in front of your 34GB in the 50GB total ( which would be around 46GB in usable space ) C Drive.

rvg90 · May 27, 2013

Wingows 8 64-bit, it says capacity 50.6 in the disk manager isn't that the usable space?

_Cosmin_ · May 27, 2013

Depends on where that bad sector was. Disk could report lower free space because of that bad sector. Back-up information then try to fix that bad sectors or ultimately change the drive.

rvg90 · May 27, 2013

Is there anyway to find out where that bad sector is?

avjguy2362 · May 27, 2013

The other space could be part of the allotted space for the shadow copy. Shadow copy is effectively backup space for the system data. There is no hidden folder to show the shadow copy and its size is dynamically managed by windows. As you start to run out of space it will minimize the amount of information in the shadow copy. There are articles here at Tom's that can show you how to manage all of Windows special features that aren't always needed.
Regarding the bad sectors: They are probably not taking up a lot of space, but running any of the disk management tools that scan for bad sectors will essentially mark them as bad sectors in the HD's directory so that you will not read or write to them. You want to do this. Data lost is already lost, however, sometimes the system can retrieve some of this data with parity bits, etc, the standard methods of managing data on discs. This is all automated. Just do the thorough error checking scan and you are done! You should be doing back-ups of all your data anyway. If you still need to be told to back up your data and you don't, you deserve to lose it!

rvg90 · May 27, 2013

avjguy2362 :

The other space could be part of the allotted space for the shadow copy. Shadow copy is effectively backup space for the system data. There is no hidden folder to show the shadow copy and its size is dynamically managed by windows. As you start to run out of space it will minimize the amount of information in the shadow copy. There are articles here at Tom's that can show you how to manage all of Windows special features that aren't always needed.
Regarding the bad sectors: They are probably not taking up a lot of space, but running any of the disk management tools that scan for bad sectors will essentially mark them as bad sectors in the HD's directory so that you will not read or write to them. You want to do this. Data lost is already lost, however, sometimes the system can retrieve some of this data with parity bits, etc, the standard methods of managing data on discs. This is all automated. Just do the thorough error checking scan and you are done! You should be doing back-ups of all your data anyway. If you still need to be told to back up your data and you don't, you deserve to lose it!

I ran many checks with windows chkdisk and it never found anything wrong, only the WD tool find bad sectors, can this by any chance cause any kind of slow copying or micro stuttering during gaming?

avjguy2362 · May 28, 2013

The WD tool probably fixed the directory when it found the bad sectors the first time it ran, automatically. The other disc scans were simply looking for more errors and there weren't any others to find. So that is good! As for the slow copying or micro stuttering, those are usually CPU, Ram, Bus and GPU related issues. Is this 50GB drive a SSD, or is it a small partition on a larger HD? Reason I ask is my first SSD was a Vertex 2 50GB and it notoriously slowed down after a few days. I would re-start on the third or fourth day and everything sped up quite a bit. As a general rule I think I have learned that the OS should be a drive that has at least twice the used space to be free. I now use a Samsung 830 128GB and purposely leave it half full, no more. It is consistently fast, regardless of how long my system has been on. So if the 50 GB partition is part of a larger drive, I would simply recommend that you move the partition and make it about 100GB.

rvg90 · May 28, 2013

avjguy2362 :

The WD tool probably fixed the directory when it found the bad sectors the first time it ran, automatically. The other disc scans were simply looking for more errors and there weren't any others to find. So that is good! As for the slow copying or micro stuttering, those are usually CPU, Ram, Bus and GPU related issues. Is this 50GB drive a SSD, or is it a small partition on a larger HD? Reason I ask is my first SSD was a Vertex 2 50GB and it notoriously slowed down after a few days. I would re-start on the third or fourth day and everything sped up quite a bit. As a general rule I think I have learned that the OS should be a drive that has at least twice the used space to be free. I now use a Samsung 830 128GB and purposely leave it half full, no more. It is consistently fast, regardless of how long my system has been on. So if the 50 GB partition is part of a larger drive, I would simply recommend that you move the partition and make it about 100GB.

I only have 1 HDD and the system drive is part of it, the reason is that here in Egypt SSD are damn expensive but i will get one in the future for sure

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