When you buy a 500GB hard drive, after turning on the computer and seeing that the hard disk space displayed by the system is only 440g, you will be very confused about where the rest of the storage space is running.
There are several main reasons why the system shows the wrong space available. For example: there are hidden invisible files, hidden recovery partitions created by the manufacturer, and so on.
Why doesn't the hard drive display space be as big as the manufacturer claims? If you've ever noticed hard drives, USB flash drives or other storage devices, you'll find that the display space is always not as big as claimed.
For hard disk manufacturers, 1KB = 1000Bytes, 1MB = 1000KB, 1GB = 1000MB. That is to say, if a hard disk is said to be 500GB, it actually contains 500*1000*1000*1000=500,000,000,000 Bytes. The manufacturer's 500GB hard drive size is calculated this way.
However, manufacturers of RAM radix to be used is not 1000, but 1024. The memory conversion mechanism is like this: 1KB=1024Bytes, 1MB=1024KB, 1GB=1024MB. Let's reverse the calculation of 500,000,000,000 Bytes in 1024 to calculate how many GB.
500,000,000,000/(1024*1024*1024)=465.66GB
In Windows system, the data conversion unit is always 1024, which is in contradiction with the hardware manufacturer's 1000, resulting in conversion There was a deviation. This will lead to the gap of 35GB.
Why is the remaining space displayed on your computer incorrect?
If you notice the amount of free space on your hard drive partition, you may feel a bit strange. If you want to delve into it, right click on the C drive and you will see the disk space marked as used. In the image below, the space used contains 279GB of files.
However, when you circle all the C disk files (including all hidden files and system files), and right-click and select Properties. You will find that the size of the space occupied by all of these folders does not match what you just saw. Looking at the figure below, we learned that all the files occupy 272GB of disk space, but the actual disk space has already used 279GB, so where is the difference of 7GB?
original, certain types of files are not displayed in Explorer's. These invisible files include system restore points and previous versions of some files. If you want to see how much space these invisible files occupy in each partition, you can run the command prompt to see what happens. It is important to note that you must be running as an administrator. Specific operation is as follows:
1. Win + R open operation, open a command prompt type cmd command input
2. vssadmin list shadowstorage
we can see, there are about 9GB storage space (Used Shadow Copy Storage space) is occupied by these invisible files, and the above mentioned is more than 7GB, but we are roughly estimated by rounding, so this calculation should be just right.
Let's talk about hidden partitions
Usually the computer itself will contain a hidden restore partition, you can use the system's own disk manager to view.
As shown in the figure below, almost 11GB of hard disk space is allocated to a hidden restore partition.
this article, because everyone on the hard disk space missing a clear understanding of it.