Where has all my external drive space gone?

Question

Where has all my external drive space gone?

I have a 2 TB Samsung T7 SSD which reports having 221.84 GB free. The thing is that the Finder shows it as having only about 19 GB of files on it. A du -h confirms that for visible data. And it throws in another 97 GB in hidden directories (22 GB is in .Trashes which doesn't delete, which I find weird), bringing the total of space consumed to be 116 GB.

By this count I should have at 1.884 TB available, not 222 GB.

I have run First Aid from within Disk Utility. It changes nothing. I could reformat it and copy everything back on. But, I'm wondering if there's a way to solve this without doing so.

Thanks!

MacBook Pro (M1, 2020)

Posted on Apr 16, 2024 5:48 PM

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Answer 1

Barney-15E

Level 10

113,082 points

May 15, 2024 7:01 AM in response to Gary Beberman

Open Disk Utility, Select Show All Devices from the View popup menu, then select and expand your Samsung SSD.

Take a screenshot of the display.

Or, run this command in Terminal and copy/paste the output here:

diskutil list

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Answer 2

May 15, 2024 7:12 AM in response to Barney-15E

Thanks much for this. I went ahead and reformatted the drive to gain back all the space. But, because some of our drives get passed around a lot, with lots of adding and deleting large files, I'm guessing I'll find other with a similar—although less exaggerated—problem. I look forward to using this on them.

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Answer 3

Barney-15E

Level 10

113,082 points

May 15, 2024 7:17 AM in response to Gary Beberman

Gary Beberman wrote:

Thanks much for this. I went ahead and reformatted the drive to gain back all the space. But, because some of our drives get passed around a lot, with lots of adding and deleting large files, I'm guessing I'll find other with a similar—although less exaggerated—problem. I look forward to using this on them.

The only thing I could think of was you somehow partitioned the drive. Erasing would have fixed that.

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