233GB minus 121GB = 16GB - its true says my computer!!

[ukdave]

...I have installed 3 Maxtor 250GB SATA hard drives that each provide about 233GB of space after formatting. Two of the drives work fine, in that whatever space is taken up by programs when deducted from the 233GB more or less comes back to the free space available shown in My Computer.

The third drive where I put a lot of my Norton SystemWorks Premier 2006 (Norton Ghost) backups is giving me food for thought! Hence my simple sum in the Subject.

I have selected all the directories in the third drive and right-clicked choosing Properties and am told that 121GB has been used. Not trusting the computer!! ... I individually added up the Directories and found that it was 121GB as near as made little difference. Deducted this figure from the 233GB and calculated 112GB.

Seems I have lost 96GB. Guys and gals, this must be wrong surely.
Or is it that I have a drive that I had better return to Maxtor?

Grateful for any ideas. I am I think a fairly logical thinking guy and can think of nothing to explain this, apart from wondering if Norton (although it displays a value in the compressed images as one thing) is it somehow still seen as the uncompressed by the computer. Did I hear someone say - "He is now clutching at straws.."!

I guess so. Thanks for helping.

David

 

[ukdave]

Update of things so far:

I decided to delete directories one by one. When I did this nothing happened on increasing the size shown either on the screen in my computer or in the image that can be displayed indicating used and space left. In fact I deleted everything and it remained at 16GB available!

So obviously something was wrong. Right first I deleted the volume of the Dynamic disk and then reformatted. No problem. The full 233GB.

Copied directories to the disk and then deleted them. No good – the disk did not return the space to be used. All that is happening is when a directory or file is added it just reduces the amount of space and this continues until all space would be gone. Deleting directories or files has no effect whatsoever as no space is returned for use. This would mean constant deleting of the volume and reformatting of disk to get back the 233GB!

Carrying out this operation continually would be complete nonsense. Now of course I am in no way any sort of a technical expert, but common sense says to me that if the other 2 hard disks of exactly the same manufacture and size behave normally – then this one should also function like them.

I will be contacting the retailer for its return under the 5 year warranty that Maxtor has on these disks. The actual make is – 250GB Maxtor Maxline III 7200 rpm / 16MB Buffer. Purchased 10 Feb 2006.

Thought you should know the outcome and maybe someone can explain to me what is probably happening just for my further knowledge.

Thanks.
David