# The case of the disappearing hard drive space



## Mark Moore (Dec 15, 2011)

Okay, this has been happening for around a week now. Admittedly, my available hard drive space is usually on the low side, but I swear I had over 1 GB free last week, and I've been saving most of my downloads to an external hard drive. The only things that I've been saving on the main hard drive are pictures and text files.

Yet my space keeps disappearing. I have a go-to directory of backed-up videos that I can delete from my hard drive, and I do that whenever my free space reaches 0 GB. I deleted a video that was around 143 MB just a few minutes ago and emptied the Recycle Bin, and my free space is already down to 117 MB.

Considering I haven't downloaded any big files to this hard drive recently, there's a lot of previously freed-up space that's simply unaccounted-for now. I have Windows 8. What could be causing this?


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## 2xg (Aug 5, 2009)

Hi there,

Please download WinDirStat and you'll be able to find out what's hogging the space in your hard drive.


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## spunk.funk (May 13, 2010)

For Windows to work correctly with a HDD, you should leave at least 15% Free space of the capacity. For storage drives that can be much less, but you should never go below 2%


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