Why does my 2 TB drive only show about 341 GB of used space?
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MellowCactus42
I'm having trouble figuring out what is consuming space on my D: drive, which I mainly use for Steam games. I had already uninstalled most of the large games, leaving only Baldur's Gate and a few smaller titles, but the free space barely changed. WinDirStat appears to show only about 341 GB when I expected the drive to contain roughly 1.8 TB of data. I also checked the partitions in Disk Management, but nothing looked obviously wrong. What could be preventing the disk-usage tool from showing everything?
Answers
You can also try WizTree, which is usually faster and gives a clear breakdown of the largest folders. Run it as administrator too, and avoid deleting anything unless you’re certain what it is. It’s also worth checking the Steam library’s storage view and the steamapps/common folder for leftover game files from titles that were uninstalled.
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Run WinDirStat as administrator by right-clicking it and choosing “Run as administrator.” Without elevated permissions, it may not be able to scan protected folders or files, which can make the total look much smaller than it really is.
MellowCactus42: That fixed it—WinDirStat now shows the full 1.8 TB. It turns out a huge amount of space was being used by old backups. Thanks for the help!
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MellowCactus42: I got WinDirStat working by running it as administrator, but I’ll keep WizTree in mind if I need another disk-usage check later.