0

I have a new Dell laptop with a 128 GB SSD, that came with Windows 8, which I recently updated to 8.1.

When I check my free space it only shows 58 GB of free space out of 99.8 GB.
I have two questions:

  1. Why do I only have 99.8 GB of space, instead of 128 GB?
  2. What is taking up 30 GB?
    When I sum up my folders on C drive, I only get 29.6 used space, so there are 10 GB "missing".
Improve this question
3
  • 4
    Check Disk Management and see if there's any other partitions or unused space. Keep in mind that many Dell PCs ship with a "utility" partition that is hidden by default. This partition contains the installation files for the OS and included software, and is used to restore the laptop to factory defaults.
    – jlehtinen
    Jan 10, 2014 at 16:47
  • 2
    In addition to @jlehtinen's answer, don't forget that the listed drive capacity, 128GB, is not the same as the usable formatted capacity of the drive. Formatted capacity will be roughly 7% lower than listed capacity, so a 128GB drive will have about 119GB of usable space.
    – LeoB
    Jan 10, 2014 at 17:03
  • 1
    A few common MS things that eat up space beyond what the others have said: Windows.old (possible, though I don't think that happens from 8 -> 8.1), Page File, Hibernate, Windows Recovery. I would personally disable hibernate (google) and disable WR. As far as bloat from the manufacturer, they usually give you a utility to backup the restore/utility partition onto discs, so you can remove that from your drive as well.
    – nerdwaller
    Jan 10, 2014 at 17:14

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
1

There are several reasons.

  • The file system requires some space for metadata (covered by another SuperUser question). This accounts for most of the "missing" capacity.
  • Some of the space may be allocated to a recovery partition.
  • When vendors represent the capacity of storage devices, they base their units on 1000 (1 kilobyte is 1000 bytes, 1 megabyte is 1000000 bytes, etc.), but it is common for operating systems and applications to represent size/capacity using units based on 1024 (1 kilobyte is 1024 bytes, 1 megabyte is 1048576 bytes, ...). Units of 1024 are more practical than units of 1000 in computing because 1024 is the exact number of unique values that can be represented in 10 bits. The 1024-based units are also referred to as kibibyte, mebibyte, gibibyte, etc.
Improve this answer
1

As jlehtinen said, there is going to be a 'recovery' partition of 5-10GB, maybe more, they put the recovery image here in case you need to restore your system, so that will be eating up some of the space.

Another thing to consider is that the Operating System, in this case Windows 8, will take up space on your drive, probably around 10GB of space for all of it and updates. If you have Office on there, it will be more.

Finally, when you see that a drive is 128GB, this is stated with the assumption that 1GB = 1000MB, but this is false. 1GB = 1024MB. The numbers given to consumers are Base-10, 1000MB = 1GB, but the computers sees things in Base-2, or binary, 1024MB = 1GB.

To figure out the actual size of the drive, in computer terms, take 128 * .93 = 119GB of storage space. If you consider a 5GB 'recovery' partition, ~10GB for the OS install, then another 1-5GB for additional software. That could easily be ~20GB, and drop you down to about 99GB free space out of the box, and it might be formatted in a filesystem that windows can't read, so you wouldn't notice it.

Improve this answer
1
  • I realize this doesn't answer part of the question. "When I sum up my folders on C drive, I only get 29.6 used space, so there are 10 GB "missing"." The answer to this is File System Block Size. In NTFS, block size is 4096 bytes. If you have a file that takes up 1542 bytes of space, it still occupies a 4096 byte block on the HDD. So, with a 4k block size, if you have a lot of 1k files, it will show a smaller amount of "used" space compared to actual "free" space.
    – mortenya
    May 23, 2014 at 15:01

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .