Hard Drive says "Not Enough Space" but still has 50 GB!

I have a small, "pocket drive" (Western digital) that actually fits in ones pocket. It comes with approximately 250 G all together, but with formatting it's more like 230gb.

Well, it the disk properties tell me it has 180 occupied, and 51.8 gb in free space remaining.

I just tried to copy over a file that was about 8 gigabytes. It told me that there was not enough room!

It accepted a much smaller file fine, but 7.67 gb's is just tooooo much for a hard drive with 50gb FREE to accept!

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

I have never encountered this before where a hard drive has so much free space and yet tells me it can't give up about 15% of that!

Anyone have ANY suggestions, other than run some type of disk diagnostic on it? Is it an Enron hard drive who reports more free disk space than it actually has?

Oh, wait! The file in question was a disk image. The RAR segments that made it up are actually transferring, whereas the disk image itself would apparently not, though the space is the same size. I just had this idea to transfer the Rar's instead, and it worked.

Okay? That's also a little puzzling...

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

What gives?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Sometimes the manufacturer formats them fat16 or some godawful bullshit like that, with these lil thumb drives. it might be having trouble handling really "large" files.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

The drive is formatted to Fat32 most likely. This is popular in those drives so they will work with more devices.

Any file larger than 4 gigs is not able to be handled by FAT32.

You can format the drive to NTFS, but you will need to be super careful with it as NTFS will utilize read ahead caching so you will have to use 'safely remove' assuming this is a USB drive. You can go into properties and disable caching on the USB drive. Google will find you step by step instructions on how to do that.

Be aware that before you format, you need to back up everything on the drive as it all will be lost.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

LOL!!! Nice one!

 

All hard drives are filthy liars.

Not a joke btw.

 

Danke!

What dost thou mean?

 

Every single example of computer hardware that holds and spins a magnetic disk, and reads and writes information on it, is especially egregious at not telling the truth?

 

So it's nature, rather than nurture?

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

You can format from FAT32 to NTFS without losing all the data... I've done so before.
But iirc to format from NTFS to FAT32 will wipe the data.

http://www.ntfs.com/quest3.htm

But it is always advisable to backup data before doing anything like this, as problems can, and do, occur. So better to be safe than sorry.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Might you have a lot of small files using 200GB & a 32K allocation unit?

A small 2-3K file with 32K allocation units will use at least one 32K chunk.

Every file will have some unused space in the last chunk. For 32K allocation units, the average loss per file in 16K.