Random 30 GB of space being use for no reason?!

[mystero3]

So I was messing around with my hard drives (virtually) making room and preparations for a newer and larger drive to come in and take the place of one of them and I noticed the older drive (will reference as E: ) was using up a random 30 GB of space when completely empty (not formatted). I ignored it because it was going to get blown up in my backyard anyway. I then added the new drive (currently F: ) in and removed the E: drive but then something weird happened as all of a sudden, my C: drive had like 2 GB of space left when I had more before the switch. I went and found all the old games that I don't play anymore but had hoped to go back to some day and deleted them giving me a good chunk of space back on the C: drive. I then proceed to format the new F: drive and after a few hours of fighting with it, I finally forced it into submission and wiping everything off of it but then again out of no where there was about (cant recall exactly) 30 GB of data being used on the freshly formatted drive. I couldn't say for certain but it appeared that the 30 GB transferred from the C: drive to the F: drive. Getting agitated now, I decided to pop in the old drive to try and fix things and then like magic, the new F: drive was empty and the 30 GB found its way to the E: drive again. This random 30 GB (32.2 to be exact) is really getting under my skin and I just want it to be gone. I cannot format the E: drive at the moment and I believe that it is due to this 30 GB of space being used for some reason.

Now that I have finally explained all that, does anyone have an answer as to what it is or how to get rid of it?

 

[MacintoshProductions]

If you have windows intalled, then Windows uses about 30 GB of data. Plus drives use some data for firmware and other things. Just because it says it 32gb of storage doesnt mean there is 32gb of USEABLE storage. Hope this helps

 

[Archgaull]

I had a similiar issue, where when I reinstalled Windows onto my 1TB hard drive, and when everything was installed I was missing about 600GB out of nowhere. I eventually just reinstalled windows, and when you are given the option format the hard drive, do so there. I still don't know why that happened.

 

[mystero3]

If you have windows intalled, then Windows uses about 30 GB of data. Plus drives use some data for firmware and other things. Just because it says it 32gb of storage doesnt mean there is 32gb of USEABLE storage. Hope this helps

Yeah but the thing is that when I formatted the new drive, the 30GB was being "used" on it immediately after the format. When I installed my older drive again with the new one in at the same time, the 30GB opened back up on the new drive and 30GB on the old one closed up.

 

[mystero3]

Returning back to answer this for future people looking at this, it was an issue with the page filing system. Windows likes to take the amount of ram that you have and set aside the same amount of space on a hard drive for what they call page filing. Its big benefit is for computers will low amounts of ram. After the ram starts to fill up, windows will take some of the programs that you havent used recently and store it in the page file to free up some more ram. When you call up that program again, it does the same thing to a different program but takes longer than usual to load because its calling it from you hdd as opposed to the ram. Seeing as how I have 32GB of ram, windows set aside 32gb for page filing which is obviously unnecessary.

To solve go to:
control panel > system and security > system > advanced system settings > advanced tab > under performance click settings > advanced tab > under virtual memory click change > uncheck "automatically manage paging file size for all drives"

Now just adjust it to something more reasonably. I turned it to 0 but windows doesnt recommend this because this is where it saves BSOD information among other things. Something safe would be over 800 mb per windows.