Problems Solved
PROBLEM OF THE FORTNIGHT
What’s eating my storage space?
Q My Windows 11 laptop has a 500GB SSD. Recently, I was surprised to find that I have only 44GB space left. The Pictures folder holds 38GB, Documents 24GB and Videos and Music virtually nil. The only apps I have installed are BT Cloud, Skype and three web browsers. Is this what I should expect, or is something filling up my hard drive?
John Brown
A Without having our hands on the machine, it’s hard to say. However, this concern is aired by many readers, so we’ll use your question as an opportunity to explore a few possibilities – and to explain why your 500GB drive probably doesn’t have 500GB of storage.
In fact, we’ll make that aspect our starting point. As we’ve mentioned many times over the years, a gigabyte as calculated by the Windows operating system is not the same as the ‘gigabytes’ marketed by drive manufacturers. Without getting bogged down in the mathematical minutiae, it comes down to whether the sums are totted up using decimal or binary. Computers work in binary, but humans use decimal.
The trouble is that a binary gigabyte is bigger than a decimal gigabyte. Why does that matter? Well, a drive marketed as 500GB these days tends to mean 500 decimal gigabytes. But when Windows gets hold of the drive it displays the capacity in binary gigabytes. This is a more ‘honest’ calculation – but 500 decimal gigabytes is just 465 binary gigabytes. Right away, that accounts for a ‘missing’ 35GB.
However, clearly that’s not nearly enough to explain why you have only 44GB left. One suspicion we have is your mention of having BT Cloud installed. It’s a common misconception that cloud services store files only in ‘the cloud’. This is not the case. Many such services, BT Cloud included, keep a local version of every file on your computer’s).
