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PROBLEM OF THE FORTNIGHT
What’s this red bar in my drive?
Q I’m a long-time Computeractive subscriber, so I’m hoping you might be able to shed some light on my problem. One of my Toshiba external drives has a red bar next to it in Windows, but it still has 79GB of storage left (see screenshot right). The other external drive has never shown this red bar. Is there a limit to how much storage is left?
Stuart Hillier
A In the most literal sense there’s a limit to how much storage is left on any drive, because each has a finite capacity.
In your case, the File Explorer screenshot you sent us shows that you have a couple of external drives. Both are nominally 1TB. However, because of the marketing-influenced maths that most drive manufacturers employ, each drive has 931GB of total space, as Windows has accurately calculated. One of those drives still has 551GB free but the other is down to 79GB, as you note – and this is why File Explorer is displaying a red bar. The colour change is simply intended to make you aware that the space is running low on that drive.
In this context, ‘low’ means that the space remaining has dropped below 15 per cent of the drive’s total capacity – because that’s the level Windows considers worthy of your attention. Of course, if you’re using this drive only to store Word documents, say, 79GB could be considered a vast amount of storage. Equally, storing loads of high-definition videos on this drive would soon use up the remaining space.
So that’s all that’s going on here. As such, there’s nothing
