The Energon Pub

I don't post here as often as I should anymore...

Anyways. I have this 1TB hard drive which I've been storing media on for a few months.

It's been hovering at about 200GB free space for most of this time, until tonight when suddenly it's saying there's only 1.58MB left. I haven't done anything to fill it up, or even modify its contents. The most I've done was edit some videos, which created some temporary files that would have been stored on it, but I've since deleted those and am still seeing 1.58MB. Even after deleting 20GB worth of video, it's still saying 1.58MB.

Any ideas?

Check it out in the "Disk Management" utility. Right click on My Computer and select "Manage", you can find disk management in that console.

Maybe Defrag the disk to ensure that it is performing at its fullest.

Also, what is the disk formatted as? FAT? FAT32? NTFS?

Its NFTS. Not seeing a disk management button anywhere though.

Running Vista 64bit, by the way. Starting to become a hindrance now, unable to save any temporary files to it for my work.

Have you recently deleted a bunch of content?

All disks use the same Recycle Bin in Windows, but the files remain on the disk it originated from until it is permanently deleted. try plugging in the external and emptying the Recycle Bin.

Jesterhead wrote:Have you recently deleted a bunch of content?

All disks use the same Recycle Bin in Windows, but the files remain on the disk it originated from until it is permanently deleted. try plugging in the external and emptying the Recycle Bin.

That was going to be my suggestion.

Haven't deleted anything, I HAVE put more stuff on there though, though definitely not 200GB worth of stuff.

Nothing's been removed, in fact, I'm pretty sure apart from a few things being downloaded onto it in the background at the time, I wasn't interacting with it in any way.

The drive is always plugged in, it takes the weight of all my media so my dwarfed internal hard drive isn't taxed and can just have programs on it. Because a lot of files are on it, that are frequently used by programs (images I work on in Photoshop) they drive is always connected to avoid any awkwardness in searching for missing files, etc. I also stream media off it onto my PS3 quite often.

I literally turned my head for five seconds and suddenly the drive was full. I've looked in all the folders that have been modified since it became full and nothing contains anything that would eat up that much space.

Ah ha, problem solved. Discovered a temporary file from editing that somehow reached almost 300GB for half an hour of footage. And I interrupted that before it finished rendering, there was still almost an hour of video left to render.

Removed it. Hard drive isn't complaining. Was sure cancelled renders would be removed. All is well again!

Thanks for the input!