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  • From: "Calvin Powers" <calvin AT cspowers.com>
  • To: "Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/" <internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [internetworkers] Need Help Understanding Disk Storage Options
  • Date: Sun, 16 Jul 2006 10:25:20 -0400

Arrgh! I wonder if someone can help educate me on the arcane intricacies of Windows file systems.

I have a plain ol' off the shelf 250Gb hard drive that I bought at Best Buy a few years ago which I use to store my iTunes library. Yesterday I was ripping CDs into my iTunes when I started getting disk space low warnings.

So according to iTunes and the folder size pop ups that come up in windows when I hover my mouse over the top level folder, I'm only using about 160Gb. Yet if I pull up the properties window on the hard drive icon, it shows less than 1 Gb of free space left. 

I checked the recycle bin allocation and says that it will only use 10% of the disk for the recycle bin. So add another 25 Gb to the 160 and I'm still only at 185Gb. Where did the other 65Gb go? Is this due to the "cluster size" issue? The disk is formatted as NTFS and I thought only FAT drives had problems with losign space due to cluster size.

Is there anything else I can do to try to salvage space on the dirve? Would defragging help at all? Because the bulk of the files on that drive are MP3 files, I wouldn't expect to save much space by enabling compression.

Given that my iTunes library is going to grow indefinitely, what would y'all recommend to me for ever increasing storage space needs? I've heard there are network attachable storage devices that can sit on your windows network and serve up large amounts of disk storage. Are these worth the money? Any specific recommendations?



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