why does my WD Passport look more full than it really is?

[theSeaHawk]

I have a Western Digital passport 120 GB external hd that "get info" shows to have 93.07 GB used when the only two folders on it with content (music and photos) show a total of 51 GB. Why would it show that if the other WD-specific folders only add a couple hundred KB?

The drive is formatted as FAT32.
The OS is 10.4.11

I'd like to use more of the total capacity of this drive; do I need to reformat it to another file system?

thanks

 

[sickmacdoc]

Sorry for a seemingly stupid question, but have you emptied the trash lately to regain the space from trashed items?

Assuming you have, take a look at your drive with the graphic space usage maps of the free utilities Disk Inventory X and/or Grand Perspective to help identify where the space is being used.

EDIT: BTW, no the FAT32 format will not affect the available space- either un-reclaimed trashed item space, large log/cache files (as shown by the Utils above), or directory corruption should be giving you the conflicting read.

 

[theSeaHawk]

Thanks for the reply. I had trashed several large redundant files off of the drive and they were still in the trash. Once I emptied that, as you suggested, the space on the drive opened up.