Disappearing hard-drive space

N

Norman Harper

New Member
I have been using my T2 almost daily for a couple of years. It has been filled to bursting several times, so one of my New Year resolutions was to try to clear as much stuff off it as possible. After six weeks of marathon viewing sessions and skimming, I'm now down to just 19 files containing programming that must amount to about 40GB of recording.
The problem is that only 300GB of the machine's 500GB remains as free space, according to the info page on the TV screen. If I carry on with my marathon viewing session, will deleting the final recording magically make the full 500GB available again, or is this missing-space phenomenon a bit like a computer hard drive needing to be defragged? If so, how do I do that?
Thanks in advance.
 
There is no defrag available. I don't understand where your missing space is - some of it is used by the TSR buffer etc, but not that much.

When you have emptied your disk you can reformat it (Menu >> Settings >> System >> Data Storage >> Format Storage), or without losing existing recordings you could load the custom firmware and then check and repair any file system errors.

Depending whether your firmware is up to date, there is also a menu option to test the drive, which might reveal something. Chances are that if it finds a problem it will recommend a reformat, but you know that already!
 
Thanks for such a quick reply, Black Hole. I don't know that already, to be honest. I'm a complete novice about these things. I know how to work the machine because Humax makes it so intuitive, but what goes on under the bonnet remains a mystery to me. It sounds to me as if the simplest answer is offloading the final recordings, which I'd like to keep, and then reformatting. Loading custom firmware or fiddling about with the system sounds like something tailor-made for me to screw up.
 
I can't think where the space is either. The custom firmware would enable you to find out (and it really isn't hard) but as long as you're happy to copy the recordigns to a USB attached drive and then reformat then that will work too.
 
The Hummy takes around 75MB of it. You can get a break down of how the space is allocated in the menu page that tells you the Hummy software revision and other bits IIRC. i remember seeing this about a week ago, and was surprised there was only about 375MB available for video.
 
I guess you mean "GB" not "MB".

According to the custom firmware web control panel, my "500GB" HDR-FOX has a total disk capacity of 447.6GiB, of which I have 390.4GiB used, 383.0GiB in the My Video folder, and 34.5GiB free. The difference between used and My Video is almost entirely accounted for by the TSR buffer, which is currently 6.8GiB.

Thus there is only 22.7GiB "missing" (in my case), but if measured against an expected 500GiB that would be 75GiB missing.

So, why the difference between 500GB and 447.6GiB? The choice of units is deliberate. Drive manufacturers quote their disk capacity in terms of the total number of bytes of unformatted storage, using decimal prefixes. 500GB means 500,000,000,000 bytes. 1GiB = 1024x1024x1024 = 1,073,741,824 bytes. Therefore 500GB = 465.7GiB, a difference from 447.6GiB probably accounted for by file system overheads.

For more info see the "GiB" entry in the Glossary (click).
 
I can't really understand why they do this, as most things computimg are to the base 2, not the base 10 and there are 8 bits to the byte (again base 2)
Oh yes, I remember, it's to make them sound bigger than they really are.
 
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