So much hard drive space

[theveggiejerk]

So new to Steam and PC gaming in general and I just installed 3 games: Neverwinter, Team Fortress 2 and Marvel Heroes and the steam folder on my external hard drive says that it's 600gb! Is this normal? I have no idea what's save to delete or anything so any help would be greatly appreciated

[theveggiejerk]

If it helps, when I check the properties of my folder it gives 2 different sizes: 1. size 38.3 gb and 2. size on disk 600 gb

[deepskyspy]

@theveggiejerk - You'll want to browse to where your Steam is installed at on your PC, then right-click "steamapps" within the Steam folder, choose properties, and wait for the size to be allocated. You'll then find the actual size of what's in use for all installed games.

[theveggiejerk]

Thanks. So I did that and it does the 2 different sizes as well: 37.8 and then size on disk 497 gb, I also went and checked the individual game folders. Marvel heroes being the biggest saying "16.1 gb and size on disk over 430 gb. is this because I installed these on an external hard drive?

[ KARR™]

It'll be due to how it's formatted.

Depending on the type, If you have a lot of small files in those folders, one will use a larger allocation size for each of them which wouldn't be used on an differently formatted drive. The size also increases the issue.

Eg. If you had 100 small files at 1k each, a normal drive would use 100k. The drive will use 32k for each of these files essentially losing a lot of space, 31k for each file is wasted and you end up with a size on disk of 3,200k. Enough of those and you have a LARGE difference between the two values.

Eg2:

Drive size   
 (logical volume)             Cluster size          Sectors   
 ----------------------------------------------------------
 512 MB or less               512 bytes             1
 513 MB - 1,024 MB (1 GB)     1,024 bytes (1 KB)    2 
 1,025 MB - 2,048 MB (2 GB)   2,048 bytes (2 KB)    4
 2,049 MB and larger          4,096 bytes (4 KB)    8

If you think of the Cluster size like a petrol can: It holds 4KB of "petrol" each. But your file is 2KB then the size is 2K, but size on disk is 4KB as you can't partly fill the cluster.

[theveggiejerk]

Digging the petrol analogy. So what steps would I take to format this drive correctly