TechArchive

Original article date: February 2000

There’s an age old problem that simply never goes away. Your hard disk always fills up. If you can remember the days when you had a 20MB hard disk, the thought of having a 4GB disk and still filling was probably shocking. But it still happens.

There are a few basic tricks that you can use, however, to reclaim valuable disk space.

Let’s start with disk partitions. Some people are not even aware that they have multiple partitions. It’s worth understanding why you have multiple partitions, because it affects how you make the most of your disk drive. A disk is divided into clusters, and clusters are divided into sectors. Prior to Windows 98 there was a restriction on how many of each there could be, and hence how big one drive could be. Therefore, while computers were shipped with, say, a single 3GB hard drive, it would be divided into a 2GB C:drive and a 1GB D: drive.

Furthermore, because there was a limitation on the total number of clusters – approximately 65,500 – and the number of sectors per cluster – 64 – the size of a sector increased if the size of a drive increased. For example, under Windows 95 my 2GB drive has 32K per sector, 64 sectors per cluster, and 65,510 clusters. And here’s the point:: all files, however small, take up at least a whole sector. On my machine, then, all files take up at least 32K. That means if I have 1000 files, each of only 12 bytes, they will still take up some 32MB. If you were to compress those files into one, using something like PKZIP or WinZip, you’d find that they took less than 12K . That’s a big saving! You could also re-partition your disk into smaller chunks: each will have smaller sectors and hence ensure smaller usage per file. This is often thought of as risky, but with a (UK pounds)40 utility called ‘Partition magic’ which you can rapidly locate on the net you’ll find it can be almost totally safe.

There are other ways to save space. Think about deleting all the stuff that you don’t really need. Choose the add/remove programs option from ‘Control panels’ and remove any programs that you simply never use – you’d be surprised just how much you might save. And what about all those things that got installed when you tried out that ‘free’ CD? Or you might have a whole office suite in addition to the one you actually use, just sat there taking up space. Or that stuff filed away under ‘Must have a look at it sometime’. Get real, life’s too short – you’ll never find the time. Bin it now.

Go to a DOS prompt and type del c:\windows\temp\*.* which chucks away any temporary files that are not currently in use by a program – the inevitable ‘access denied’ message will tell you that some of the files there are still in use, but that’s okay, they’ll be left alone. Often this will remove large forgotten files from ages ago when you crashed the PC while editing a huge document or something. Finally, look for programs that generate loads of small files that are not needed. For example, I know of a fax program that generates a 20K file per page it sends, plus a small text file as well. After a few weeks, these get seriously out of hand. You could delete these manually, or use a simple DOS batch file (del c:\faxprog\*.fax) and put a shortcut to it in your ’startup’ folder. A word of advice though – don’t put the ‘del c:\windows\temp\*.*’ command in a startup batch file, or you will probably delete on bootup the ‘rescue files’ that you rely on after a crash.

February 2000