Hard drive says full when it's not?

[spiphix]

Hey guys, the community at Toms Hardware has never failed to help me with my PC problems and I was wondering if you can help again. I have a Seagate portable hard drive which is saying it is full when I know it shouldn't be. Recently it said 485mb left of space, so I deleted around almost half of the files only to find that it now says 253mb left. I have no idea what could be causing this and have scanned both my computer and the portable hard drive.





My Specs:

Intel Core i5 CPU 760 @ 2.80GHz
G.Skill 8192MB RAM
OS Drive: 120gb Mushkin Chronos SSD
Seagate 500gb portable hard drive
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (6.1, Build 7601) Service Pack 1
Motherboard: MSI P55A-G55

I think this is the portable drive:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148863

Thanks for any feedback, you guys never seem to fail me!

Adam

 

[Pinhedd]

Some of the hard drive space is reserved for out of filesystem operations such as system restore. Selecting all files and folders via Ctrl-A will not select hidden files and folders, and protected system files and folders. Some of these cannot be interpreted to have a particular size and will not be counted even if they are visible

If you want to free up some space you can do the following on a per-drive basis:

1. reduce or disable System Restore

2. reduce or disable the Recycling Bin

3. reduce or disable the system page file

It is recommended that a small page file be left on a system drive for crashdump and diagnostic purposes.

 

[spiphix]

Ah ok, I didn't know system restore's file size didn't show. I just deleted a restore point which increased the space left by about 20gb. Thanks a lot!

 

[spiphix]

Best answer selected by spiphix.

 

[Pinhedd]

Ah ok, I didn't know system restore's file size didn't show. I just deleted a restore point which increased the space left by about 20gb. Thanks a lot!

You should also run a disk cleanup, that will get rid of some latent information such as crash dumps, install information and temporary files. Some of this is visible but much of it isn't

 

[spiphix]

Ok, i'll look into that, thanks a lot for your help! And I must say, that is an impressive rig! I'm quite jealous

 

[Pinhedd]

Ok, i'll look into that, thanks a lot for your help! And I must say, that is an impressive rig! I'm quite jealous

thanks

 

[Pyree]

This topic has been closed by Pyree