General Question

ragingloli's avatar

What could be the reason for the discrepance between the space used and the combined size of all folders on the system drive in Windows Vista?

Asked by ragingloli (52369points) August 16th, 2010

I have this peculiar occurance here where the amount of space used on the C drive is about 112 Gbyte, but the combined size of the content only amounts only to about 94 Gbyte.
What could be the reason for this.

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2 Answers

the100thmonkey's avatar

The page file and hibfile.sys?

the100thmonkey (11277points)“Great Answer” (2points) Flag as…
jerv's avatar

Allocation blocks.

You can’t have two files in the same block.

Say for the sake of illustration that you have a drive that has blocks that are 4KB each and you have 10 files that are 1.5KB each. Those ten files will total only 15KB, but they will take up 40KB on your drive since each file will claim an entire 4KB block even though it won’t fill the whole thing.

jerv (31079points)“Great Answer” (0points) Flag as…

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