Windows 10: Storage spaces showing more used than actual

I am working on tearing down my storage space because it wouldn't allow me to add more drives. Currently I have removed files from it yet it still shows full capacity. SS says using 55.8 TB file explorer shows only 44.2 TB used. How do I resolve this?

submitted by /u/john_the_idiot
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:)

 

Windows Storage Spaces using more Space than the Content in it

I don’t have a lot of experience with Storage Spaces. But what this looks like to me is a misinterpretation of drive space usage on a virtual disk, commonly associated with “thin provisioning.”

In the first image, you show a storage pool usage of nearly 50GB, which represents the total physical space used on the underlying hardware.

In the second image, you show only 200MB used of a virtual volume that was carved out of the available physical storage pool.

A 3.62TB thinly provisioned virtual disk will only use a small amount of the underlying physical storage. When you begin adding data to the virtual disk, the underlying physical storage will increase in usage to grow with the storage used on the virtual disk. In this way, you can over provision thinly provisioned disks so that you can actually have several virtual disks that are, in total, larger than the physically available storage.

However, as a result of the thinly provisioned disk, the underlying physical storage needed will only grow and never shrink. This is because sections of the physical storage have been allocated to the virtual disk, even if the storage on the virtual disk has been erased. Think about how a deleted file can actually be recovered by scanning a disk. Just because you are only using 200MB doesn’t mean that 50GB of the “freed space” doesn’t still contain data. Eventually the virtual disk will consume the entirety of the allocated space on the physical storage regardless of how much storage is actually used on the virtual disk.

To free the physical storage space it is necessary for the virtual disk to both release the unused sectors (thru TRIM and UNMAP commands) to the underlying storage and for the physical storage to be released and possibly defragmented to consolidate the still used storage to a single contiguous block. This is called dead space reclamation.

In this case, it looks like the following command, in an administrative Powershell, and linked website can help your situation. This command will release the unused sectors on the virtual disk and release the “unused” slabs back to the storage space pool.

Optimize-Volume (storage)

I can’t find any documentation on the subject to indicate that freeing the underlying storage space usage is actually possible. It is possible that there is no way to release the underlying storage space once it is provisioned, unless you create a new virtual disk and copy the data over. Even then, a thinly provisioned disk will always grow again. The best solution in this scenario is to simply allocate a fixed space virtual disk so that there is no discrepancy between virtual disk size and used physical space.

Here’s a bit more reading on the subject: Navigating Storage Spaces and Pools

Storage Space issues with Server 2012 R2

 

Storage shows more space than it actually has

Vijay,

I wrote about that 2 posts above. The C: partition is exactly 49.17GB, not 233GB. That's the problem. In Disk Management it says the same. In the File Manager, it says the same. Using Linux, in Gparted, it says the same. The old Disk Clean-up says the same.

This something to do with Settings, a bug I suppose. The new feature Storage gives the wrong reading. I wouldn't have looked into Storage, if "Actions recommended" won't show a sign. Quite happy with using the old Disk Clean-up.

Is there a way to get rid of this Storage?

Maybe, the next "upgrade" would get rid of the problem.

Feedback: I've already noticed this happening in other laptops too. The Storage shows strangely high amounts than the C: partition has.
So, this is a bug.

 

Storage shows more space than it actually has

My Windows 10 partition C: actually has 49.2GB and the Recovery 1.26GB, so together 50.46GB. But, the Storage says, it has 233GB and 224GB as used. I've no idea, from where Storage gets such info. Does anyone know, how to correct this? Thanks!