3

I have a 250 GB SSD installed as my primary disc on which I have Win 10 installed. I just recently realized that the explorer overview & the windows disc property dialog stated, that there are 200 GB used & only 31 GB free on that disk.

Since I was curious on where that much used space came from, I started the free application WinDirStat which told me that there were only 62 GB used on C.

Also if I select everything under C with hidden files & system folders shown in the explorer, the properties dialog states that those are only 62,5 GB in sum.

Where do the 200 GB used space come from which are shown in the disc overview?

enter image description here

Improve this question
2
  • 1
    Obviously that program is wrong, perhaps because it doesn't look at system files or some other similar reason.
    – Julie Pelletier
    Commented Aug 1, 2016 at 21:33
  • 1
    Right-click and run the app as administrator and see if you get the accurate number that way?
    – Vomit IT - Chunky Mess Style
    Commented Aug 1, 2016 at 21:37

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
2

Selecting all files and showing properties skips files where your user accound doesn't have access to while showing the disk pproperties reads the NTFS meta data and always shows the correct usage.

Run TreesizeFree (as admin) to see a better view of the disk space usage. Running as admin shows hidden folder like System Volume Information where system restore points and chkdsk logs are stored.

enter image description here

enter image description here

Improve this answer
1
  • Running WinDirStat as admin did the trick as well...
    – suamikim
    Commented Aug 3, 2016 at 12:36
0

Those tools typically don't count hidden files (and system files, but those are typically hidden too).

Same for explorer: hidden means hidden; so those are not shown.

Improve this answer
1
  • WinDirStat actually will count those system files. The tools just have to be elevated to Administrator permissions, otherwise since they don't have rights to read the files, they cannot count them.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Aug 1, 2016 at 22:40

You must log in to answer this question.

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