Windows 10: Hard drive uses up more space than normal when downloading or installing a program

Hi there,


a few months back I started having a very strange issue regarding hard drive space on my 1TB WD Blue HDD, one that I have yet to find a similar post about anywhere on support forums.


Whenever I'm downloading anything P2P, games/updates, large ZIPs, anything that's fairly big in size, and even installing any large program/game, my hard drive will assign way more space than required.


So for example, if a game's download size is 20GB, the hard drive fills up as much as 5 times that, to the point where the system reports the drive as full, when in reality it isn't, but it still prevents me from continuing the download if I'm midway through.


When I open a utility like WinDirStat to find any temp files that might be causing a problem, the program also tells me the drive is full, but can't find the cause for it aka it can't find any file that's gotten excessively big, so my assumption is just Windows wrongly assigning too much space.


Restarting my PC apparently fixes the incorrect reading. That is, until I download or install anything again.


Funnily enough, this only happens in said HDD. The 120GB SSD I'm using as my boot drive doesn't have this issue.


Things I've tried:

- Updating Windows I've gone through 2 major updates now

- Chkdsk

- DISM.exe tool

- Scandisk


After dealing with this for a couple months now, I'm at a loss as to what might be the culprit here. The computer is pretty much brand new Ryzen 7 3700X, 32GB DDR4 RAM, and I highly doubt it's the drive since I've previously had it for more than a year without any issues.


Thanks in advance!

:)

 

Free hard drive backup/restore program?

I am looking for a free (freeware) program that will back up and restore a hard drive. I'm looking to clone a few external hard drives. If the program will backup the used space instead of the whole drive this will be awesome! Thanks for any suggestions.

 

Free hard drive backup/restore program?

Obviously you're looking for something besides your Xp Pro utility that does this?

 

Partitioning My Hard Drive Without Losing Data


Download any of the suggested programs above and fire up Youtube for a step by step instruction. Easus is a good software. But I personally use MiniTool Partition Wizard.

It will only take 5 minutes to become a professional hard drive partitioner.