External USB hard drive showing wrong "Free Space" "Used Space" inthe Capacity

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RayLopez99

The USB drive by Western Digital is the My Passport series, for Windows 7, NTFS formatted. It shows, and I've rechecked a half dozen times and lookedfor hidden files, that total capacity is 465 GB (taking the smaller number) and, for each folder (taking the largest number and even rounding up) theused space should be 160 GB, leaving about 305 GB. Yet Internet Explorer shows these two numbers reversed (almost, it shows 300 GB and 165 for used and free, respectively). Why? As best I can tell, somehow the partition tables or what not are screwed up. I'm pretty confident, having checked a dozen times, my eyes are not playing tricks on me.

I'm mildly curious to fix this, but if I reformat, I'll lose the excellent "encryption" tool that comes with every Western Digital external USB HD, that makes it impossible to access the drive unless you enter a password (I think the program is called "WD Unlocker").

What tools can I use to diagnose? Preferably free? I did check the onlinearticles taking about "shadow" folders and what not, but they would only explain about 10% of the difference. This is a huge difference.

RL
 
On Sun, 16 Feb 2014 22:13:27 -0800 (PST), RayLopez99
The USB drive by Western Digital is the My Passport series, for
Windows 7, NTFS formatted. It shows, and I've rechecked a half dozen
times and looked for hidden files, that total capacity is 465 GB
(taking the smaller number) and, for each folder (taking the largest
number and even rounding up) the used space should be 160 GB, leaving
about 305 GB. Yet Internet Explorer shows these two numbers reversed
(almost, it shows 300 GB and 165 for used and free, respectively).
Why? As best I can tell, somehow the partition tables or what not are
screwed up. I'm pretty confident, having checked a dozen times, my
eyes are not playing tricks on me.

I'm mildly curious to fix this, but if I reformat, I'll lose the
excellent "encryption" tool that comes with every Western Digital
external USB HD, that makes it impossible to access the drive unless
you enter a password (I think the program is called "WD Unlocker").

What tools can I use to diagnose? Preferably free? I did check the
online articles taking about "shadow" folders and what not, but they
would only explain about 10% of the difference. This is a huge
difference.

--
I use Total Commander and Turbo Navigator for file managers (turbonav
is free). Just used explorer to delete some files/directories created
by a download manager in non-standard ASCII, either wouldn't delete.

So far as that discrepancy, space usages, might want a better file
manager than explorer for more detail. I've never run across such,
although I do only have one NTFS drive (a token, smaller drive) out of
a dozen or so.

To be honest, I wouldn't touch NTFS with a 10-ft. pole for serious
considerations -- too many past disasters with it, especially with M$
calling NTFS "proprietary." FAT32 is all I'm interested in, and as
far as anything unrevealed, at least data material exposed to the
Inet, (such as not a copy of Snowden's files), I keep "uncompromised"
from the approach of binary sector backups, restoring periodically the
OS from a safeguard standpoint, regardless or not of whether I notice
the occasional anomaly that occurs.

Were it my drive I'd want to know where and what the mysterious 300G
usage entailed. No doubt about it.
 
RayLopez99 said:
The USB drive by Western Digital is the My Passport series, for Windows 7, NTFS formatted. It shows, and I've rechecked a half dozen times and looked for hidden files, that total capacity is 465 GB (taking the smaller number) and, for each folder (taking the largest number and even rounding up) the used space should be 160 GB, leaving about 305 GB. Yet Internet Explorer shows these two numbers reversed (almost, it shows 300 GB and 165 for used and free, respectively). Why? As best I can tell, somehow the partition tables or what not are screwed up. I'm pretty confident, having checked a dozen times, my eyes are not playing tricks on me.

I'm mildly curious to fix this, but if I reformat, I'll lose the excellent "encryption" tool that comes with every Western Digital external USB HD, that makes it impossible to access the drive unless you enter a password (I think the program is called "WD Unlocker").

What tools can I use to diagnose? Preferably free? I did check the online articles taking about "shadow" folders and what not, but they would only explain about 10% of the difference. This is a huge difference.

RL
Click to expand...

The System Volume Information folder holds restore points,
but it's also used for Volume Shadow Service (VSS).

You may be running software, which asks to keep a snapshot
of the file system on the disk. And that snapshot, effectively
"differencing software", uses up space on the disk, maintaining
two versions of files. The more the files change, the more
space gets used up.

You can have multiple VSS writers involved, keeping various
snapshot instances.

There is a registry setting, which limits VSS usage of the disk.
By default, it might be limited to 30 percent or so. Presumably
you can trim down the max usage, at the expense of causing the
VSS software using the space, to fail. For example, with restore
points, maybe 3GB is enough to store a useful set of restore points.
Higher allocations would not serve much of a purpose.

You can also set up System Restore, to not monitor external disks.
But that doesn't mean that other software you're using, isn't
using VSS service for some reason.

Example of screwing around with VSS. The author here, uses WinDirStat to
check for waste.

( http://www.quepublishing.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1336797 wouldn't load )

https://web.archive.org/web/2014010...ublishing.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1336797

A picture of WinDirStat (similar to SequoiaView)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinDirStat

Paul
 
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