HDD Capacity

[everton66]

I'm curious about HDD capacity after helping a friend recover some deleted photos recently. He deleted 9000 by accident.

When you delete files, the size of the files you delete are made available to you in that the visible HDD free space increases. But as we know, files are never deleted otherwise I would not have been able to recover these 9,000 photos.

My question is, how many deleted items can a HDD retain without running out of space? It seems that you could have a 250gb HDD with 200gb of deleted files but still have more than 50gb free space available. How does that work?

Cheers.

[JohnnyReb51]

Hiya.

The space originally occupied by the deleted files is marked as available and/or free space by the Operating System once deleted, the files havent technically been deleted as such and are still there as you say, but once that marked free space is overwritten, then the original deleted file is lost or becomes fragmented beyond full recovery. You probably got them back by not writing to the hard drive, which is the correct procedure and luckily, the recovery software didnt write to the deleted files area.

So if the HD is 250gb and the O/S, with sufficient room to function was say 25gb, then there would be approximately 225gb of free space. You wouldnt run out of space from deleted items, because its marked as freespace by the O/S as I said and is re-used again once written to, so the deleted files would reduce in number as the drive is written to.

Your Operating System/Programs take up a certain amount of space and needs even more space for the O/S and any programs to function, once all available space is used up and you then start infringing on the O/S swapfile space, the O/S will then slow down to a halt, because there is no room left to manipulate files.

If the HD was a slave drive, then all of the space could be used, albeit allowing for any discrepancies, but again, if the whole drive was deleted, all the files would again technically still be there, but marked as free space by the O/S until you write to the drive.

Well thats my tanners worth on it anyway.

[everton66]

Thanks JR. I think I get it now....