# Full Hard Drive? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [May 15, 2013, 10:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/full-hard-drive/658388 "2013-05-15T10:04:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Musicat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/musicat/32/20189_2.png) [@Musicat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Musicat)\ **Post date:** [May 18, 2013, 12:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/full-hard-drive/658388/22 "2013-05-18T00:41:08Z")
> [@bobot](#): > > Thanks! Whenever my computer is finished with the de-frag, I’ll check into that. If you do it in that sequence, you’ve wasted the defrag. Deleting large numbers of random temp files and flushing the recycle bin may leave copious holes, and you’ll have to defrag again. While defragging won’t give you any more space, it should be the _last_ step in cleaning and optimizing a system. And FYI, some defrags will balk if they run across errors in the file table that should be fixed with CHKDSK, so the sequence should be: delete, flush recycle bin, CHKDSK, defrag. ---
**Author:** ![bobot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bobot/32/21622_2.png) [@bobot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bobot)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2013, 9:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/full-hard-drive/658388/23 "2013-05-19T21:14:33Z")
Thanks again, everyone, for your help and suggestions. It was a Google Earth file that was over 490 Gig! ( c:\ users\ me\ app data\ local low\ google\ google earth\ unified\_cache\_leveldb\_leveldb2 ) 490 gigs. No idea how that happened, but it’s gone now. ---
**Author:** ![Musicat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/musicat/32/20189_2.png) [@Musicat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Musicat)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2013, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/full-hard-drive/658388/24 "2013-05-19T22:05:03Z")
> [@bobot](#): > > Thanks again, everyone, for your help and suggestions. It was a Google Earth file that was over 490 Gig! > ( c:\ users\ me\ app data\ local low\ google\ google earth\ unified\_cache\_leveldb\_leveldb2 ) > 490 gigs. No idea how that happened, but it’s gone now. Just curious…was that marked as a temporary file (typically \*.tmp)? ---
**Author:** ![johnpost](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f17d59/32.png) [@johnpost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/johnpost)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2013, 10:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/full-hard-drive/658388/25 "2013-05-19T22:58:22Z")
it’s a big big world. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Niply\_Elder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/8e8cbc/32.png) [@The\_Niply\_Elder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Niply_Elder)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2013, 11:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/full-hard-drive/658388/26 "2013-05-19T23:25:08Z")
Defraging won’t really speed up your system at all. It’s a mostly dinosaur technology for dinosaur systems. ---
**Author:** ![Duckster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/duckster/32/1244_2.png) [@Duckster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duckster)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2013, 11:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/full-hard-drive/658388/27 "2013-05-19T23:53:06Z")
> [@Chickenwrangler](#): > > Defragging will NOT give you more disk space. This is inaccurate. In a heavily fragmented Windows-based hard drive, thousands of tiny file fragments take up an inordinate amount clusters, creating excessive slack space. Defragging these files reduces the slack space and you can effectively recover quite a bit of disk space. Defragging will give you back wasted, unused disk space. ---
**Author:** ![bobot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bobot/32/21622_2.png) [@bobot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bobot)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2013, 12:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/full-hard-drive/658388/28 "2013-05-20T00:01:48Z")
> [@Musicat](#): > > Just curious…was that marked as a temporary file (typically \*.tmp)? I’m pretty sure that it was, but I’m not positive- it was an entire folder. It was full of thousands of files. If it wasn’t google earth, I would not have deleted it so suddenly, but I was pretty that deleting anything google wouldn’t harm my operating system. ---
**Author:** ![GuanoLad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guanolad/32/42_2.png) [@GuanoLad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GuanoLad)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2013, 2:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/full-hard-drive/658388/29 "2013-05-20T02:05:56Z")
It was probably all the 3D buildings that pop up in Google Earth. Big cities that have loads of them built take up a lot of space, and if there’s a glitch and they don’t clear from the Temp folder, then that’s tons of useless information just sitting there, never to be referenced again. ---
**Author:** ![Chickenwrangler](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chickenwrangler/32/91_2.png) [@Chickenwrangler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chickenwrangler)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2013, 2:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/full-hard-drive/658388/30 "2013-05-20T02:50:26Z")
Technically you are of course both correct (you been speaking with my ex-wife? :eek:) “Niply Elder” - Not everyone yet has the SSD’s (Solid State Drives with no moving parts) that don’t need defragging but for a lot of people still using the dinosaur technology of a Hard Drive defragging can make a difference to performance. Hence the reference to spinning platters and moving heads in my post. “Duckster” - The main purpose of defragging is to tidy up the hard drive and speed up the computer. The slack space created by the process will not give you any significant extra/less disk space. Certainly nothing that the OP will notice when looking for nearly 500 unaccounted Gigs. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/full-hard-drive/658388.md?page=1)