Why are hdd's never completely empty when formatted?
- Thread starter Phil2008
- Start date
Caporegime
no idea,maybe boot record/hidden partition? havnt really noticed to be honest
Nope Ive deleted all partitions before doing a full format on this drive. Also with other hdd's Ive had, Ive used tools that restores the drive to the factory default,(kill disk) but na, space was still used after a quick format
I thought it was a virus or something when I noticed this for the first time about 4-5yrs ago
Soldato
Pretty sure that's standard, is it not the space allocated to the directory of all data on the drive etc?
Soldato
- Joined
- 10 Apr 2004
- Posts
- 13,496
Stores information about the drive, format, etc.
It has to store something to tell the OS what format it is, user permissions, etc.
It has to store something to tell the OS what format it is, user permissions, etc.
Soldato
That would be a small amount of data, 111 MB doesn't seem quite right to consist of all of that?
Man of Honour
In the original example the space used is about s hundredth of one percent of the available space. Is it really worth getting worked up about?
Deleted member 138126
D
Deleted member 138126
NTFS is an incredibly complex file system (check out the links below if you want to get an idea of how complex), and a brand-new formatted volume has all the necessary structures, which take up some space. Just as an example, there is a bitmap that describes whether every single cluster on the disk is used or not, and in the case of a large disk, involves a lot of clusters.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc781134(v=ws.10).aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc781134(v=ws.10).aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS