Why is there large used space after erasing external drive with disk utility?

ALSO: quick-ERASED PARTITION, then REMOVED partition, then quick-ERASED HARD DRIVE, all of which appeared to work.

ejected disk, closed Disk Utility. connected disk -

result at end - drive still shows single partition 999GB WITH 668GB USED

i followed your advice.

1 - i disagree, read the post question - there's more in common than difference, which lends perspective to the issue.

2 - bombarding? i doubt it

3 - i doubt this too

conclusion - i think you're more intent to disparage than be helpful. I certainly have got better things to do, but thanks for the suggestions

OS X creates a number of files in the root folder of filesystems — Spotlight indexes, the contents of the Trash, etc. — so perhaps it is these, although I would be surprised to see these exceed more than a couple of megabytes. What filesystem did you format it as?

I doubt it is anything more than filesystem metadata, but if you're extremely curious, you could go to the Terminal, cd to the filesystem in question (cd '/Volumes/<volume name>') and then type du -h and hit return. This will list every file in the filesystem and its size, hidden or otherwise.

I'm now even more certain that it is filesystem metadata. You know how at the bottom of advertisements you get little citations along the lines of 'actual formatted capacity less'? This is why. The more sophisticated the filesystem, the more inaccessible space it devotes to keeping track of its contents — filesystems like ZFS and BTRFS are far worse 'offenders' here than HFS+ is.

The metadata will have been created as part of the filesystem creation — any remnants of the NTFS filesystem will have been ignored. On such a large drive, I suspect HFS+ allocates a great deal of space to metadata so that it can keep track of the whole thing. On a smaller drive, it would allocate less, on a large one it would allocate more.

I'm no filesystem expert, but this is my understanding of the situation. Other sources will probably explain this better.

HI - i do not think this is purely metadata. (though it could be with your windows disk with such small used memory) i have a 1TB macbook pro drive that i have tried to reformat

METHOD 1 (recommended by advanced Apple Techy) - select hard drive (not partition) select mac os (journalled) and press 'apply' - "this will format drive removing all data. it is always best to work with the drive and not partition, if you are formatting an entire drive."

result at end - drive still shows single partition 999GB WITH 668GB USED

METHOD 2 (after response from Apple techy) - select hard drive and mac os (journalled), press secure erase and select 'write zeros' takes 12 hours

result at end - drive still shows single partition 999GB WITH 668GB USED

the thread was the only one that came up with this issue - i didn't check the dates. it'd be as easy for someone to answer this thread as another - as you did. not with a solution though. why duplicate a subject that has already been raised?

1. You don't have the same issue, in fact as you have supplied little detail it's hard to discern what your problem is yet.

2. You (and in reply me) are bombarding the inboxes of people who have probably forgotten this thread, not a very nice thing to do to them.

3. If you have a problem but it is not worth starting a thread and describing it properly it is unlikely that anyone else will view it as serious.

Yeah, actually this was one of the few results googling for this same question. 999G available, 653M used.

Wanting to free up that half-gig if possible.

So time is irrelevant - getting a cogent response to issues people have over time is what matters.

So IF that half-gig is able to be freed up, would be interested to know.

15Dynasty,

This is almost 5 years ago now since the original post, but I did the following. Substitute your own names for the following example names:

-computer name: "Peach";

-your user name: "Visor";

-external drive (or a partition on it) name: "Beard".

Open Terminal. Using the "cd .." command, go up usually two layers so that Terminal shows that you are in your computer's most root-est folder. The Terminal prompt will start like this:

Peach:~ Visor$

and end up like this:

Peach:/ Visor$

The tilde ("~") after "Peach:" has changed to a forward-slash ("/"), indicating that you have moved from the user's folder to the root-est folder.

Type "cd Volumes/Beard" (presuming that the drive is mounted).

The prompt should now look like this:

Peach:Beard Visor$

Now, what we want to do is to look at every file, visible and hidden, in all subfolders, and record the output. Caution: if you do this on a drive which isn't empty, you're going to be there for a while. If something like that happens by a typo, type CTRL-C to cancel it in progress. Type this command:

ls -alR > ~/Desktop/BeardFiles.txt

It's the "list" command, and the three arguments tell it to i) include hidden files in ii) long format in iii) all subfolders, and to send the output to the file specified, on your Desktop. It seems to miss a few files in .Trashes, which reports "permission denied", but that shouldn't materially matter if the Trash is empty.

For an "empty" drive, you'll see a lot of files.

I didn't add them all up, but browsing through the Spotlight files particularly, it looks like it could explain the phenomenon. It's indexing, so the operating system can find files faster.

There may be more elegant ways to do this, but this is a way I know.

Charles