My Hard disk can never run out of space?

[Sir Arun]

This is really weird.

So I have a 1TB HDD which in reality only has 931GB of space (I know why that is the case, lol, different story)

Until yesterday, I had occupied some 929.7 or 929.8 GB of it, so that My Computer only showed about 1.2 GB of space remaining.

Now I know a lot of people say you should always make sure there is at least 15% of free space left, but my computer didnt start acting weird or anything.

That being said, I restarted my computer today morning and noticed that suddenly, it says there are 8.76 GB free now, even though I have done nothing in the time period between yesterday and today.


I have noticed this exact same behavior on my laptop too - whenever my hard drive seems to get full, after a couple of days, some extre free gigabytes appear out of nowhere.

I conclude my research with the finding that the reading of how much space we have in our HDD is actually buggy and faulty, and that we should not trust Microsoft's measurement tools.

If our HDD was really that full, we simply would not be able to download more stuff, getting warnings etc. While this warning does appear if we want to install a program that requires many GBs and our HDD doesnt have that much; data that acumulates on a daily use such as downloading pics, e-mails, music files, etc. can be done even if your Hard drive is full, and in reality your HDD is not full at all, as in the last moment, new space appears our of nowhere.



By the way, I have shadow copies turned OFF, so I doubt Microsoft had cluttered my HDD with backups and is simply deleting them to make space when needed.

Cheers and long live the miraculous HDD technology,

Sir Arun

 

[BrightCandle]

It may have emptied parts of the recycle bin, got rid of some temporary files or any other files that are short lived and can be deleted on shutdown or boot up. This is one of the reasons why you ideally leave a reasonable amount of space for the OS and applications because they do utilise drive space extensively to cache what they are doing.

But there is just no reasonable way that microsoft's free space count is wrong, its just likely taking action to save you from yourself and clearing some space on the drive where it can.

 

[Sir Arun]

I usually clear temp files about once a week, and no more than 200MB of data accumulates during this time...so, suddenly 7GB of free space? Weird. I also always keep the recycle bin empty.

I hope it hasnt randomly deleted files from My Pictures or My Documents, but I wonder whether there are any articles about this subject.

 

[TheStu]

I usually clear temp files about once a week, and no more than 200MB of data accumulates during this time...so, suddenly 7GB of free space? Weird. I also always keep the recycle bin empty.

I hope it hasnt randomly deleted files from My Pictures or My Documents, but I wonder whether there are any articles about this subject.

Probably not that. It could have been doing disk optimizations in the background, moving some stuff around while you're idle to more efficiently utilize the space. That plus standard housekeeping on the drive could account for the freed up space. Bear in mind we are talking about less than a 1% difference.

 

[Fayd]

Probably not that. It could have been doing disk optimizations in the background, moving some stuff around while you're idle to more efficiently utilize the space. That plus standard housekeeping on the drive could account for the freed up space. Bear in mind we are talking about less than a 1% difference.

volume shadow copy probably realized he's close to out of space, so decided to remove some really old copies of files.

 

[imagoon]

Or shrunk the swap file. If it is set to auto growth it will shrink during a reboot. I do question the logic of how he got from more space "appeared" to "how much space we have in our HDD is actually buggy and faulty, and that we should not trust Microsoft's measurement tools. "

Seems like a rather large claim to make with the minimal evidence.

 

[TheStu]

volume shadow copy probably realized he's close to out of space, so decided to remove some really old copies of files.

I had forgotten about VSC, but he said that is set to OFF on his system.

 

[corkyg]

Also, the MFT Reserved Zone can get smaller as the drive is filled with actual data.

 

[sub.mesa]

System Restore.

 

[BFG10K]

I conclude my research with the finding that the reading of how much space we have in our HDD is actually buggy and faulty, and that we should not trust Microsoft's measurement tools.

Can you please elaborate on this, preferably with links? Thanks.

 

[coffeejunkee]

Doesn't seem like thoroughly scientific research. Assuming Windows is running from this disk, either a smaller swap file is used or the hibernation file is deleted. At least, that's my guess, never actually been that close to my drives limit. Or system restore files are deleted like sub.mesa says, that sounds about right.