I've been using an external hard drive for quite some time, and recently I've upgraded to an internal drive and therefore moved all of my files from the external hard drive to the internal one.
Now my external hard drive is (obviously) empty. But at the same time it's not.
For some reason Windows and also Linux still show around 333-336 MB of used space, even though the drive is completely empty.
Yes, I am viewing hidden files. Yes, I am also viewing protected system files.
The only 2 folders remaining were a Recycle Bin folder, which is empty, and the System Volume Information folder.
So I went ahead and booted into Ubuntu, deleted both folders (which were only 1 MB in total), pressed CTRL+H in the file manager to view hidden files and yes, the drive is now really empty (some weird Trash folder appeared which I can't delete but its less than a KB big).
Yet Windows and GParted still say that 333 MB is in use.
How can that be?
The external HDD is made by Western Digitals, has 500 GB total space, and the partition is 500 GB big (NTFS).
Here's a screenshot:
In Windows 7:
Best Answer
NTFS allocates a hidden data-structure for it's meta-data.
For a 500 GB partition this will be around 350 MB when the NTFS format is done with default settings.
So this is completely normal. This is just the way NTFS was designed.
The only way to get rid of it is to re-format with another filesystem.