memory discrepancy!

N

nicksicle

New Member
hi, this is my first post, and I've just got a quick question
does anyone know why my windows xp says that there's more space taken on my drive than there acctually is? (actual method was by selecting all the files and getting their properties)
All files are shown, and windows still says that there's less free space than there should be!

This just happened recently too, out of blue!
weird!

anyone else come across this problem?!
thanks in advance
-nick :confused:
 
This is a common misconception. The minimum block size for the hard disk format is often too large for some small files and so there is some wastage. Windows XP can format the drive as NTFS and this allows files to take up more space than required by FAT and FAT32 to allow room for file expansion. This is one of the ways that framentation is reduced in NTFS. Most people don't worry about this since hard drives are cheap and the reduced fragmentation is beneficial. However, if you want to save disk space you can archive the files into a larger container file (e.g. zip).
 
NTFS and FAT32 have 4KB blocks if I'm not mistaken
Click to expand...
Well they're 4 kB blocks by default for drives bigger than 2 GB. For drives smaller than that the block size decreases. I guess they figure if you have a big drive you won't care if it some of the space is wasted.
 
how about discrepancies of +/- 2gb? anyone ever come across that?
(my partitions are 20gb and my filesystems are NTFS)
thanks!
 
nicksicle said:
how about discrepancies of +/- 2gb? anyone ever come across that?
(my partitions are 20gb and my filesystems are NTFS)
thanks!
Click to expand...
Discrepencies between what exactly (what readings)?
 
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