External hard drive shows too little memory - what to do?

If your external hard drive shows too little memory, dozens of gigabytes are usually missing. We'll show you how to solve the problem.

External hard drive shows too little memory

• Manufacturer trick: Actually all manufacturers of storage devices trick when calculating the storage space. As a rule, around seven percent of the specified memory is missing. A 500 GB hard drive therefore does not have much more than 450 GB of storage.
• Display error: If the memory is not used at all, but is only displayed incorrectly, you can find out with the free tool TreeSize Free. The software shows you exactly how much memory is available and where it has gone.
• Check: If a significant amount of storage space is missing, you should defragment the hard disk and check the hard disk for errors.
• Formatting: If none of this helps, save the data on your computer and let Windows format the hard drive. Select the "NTFS" format.

Reconfigure external hard drive

If the problem still cannot be solved, you can completely delete the volume of the external hard drive and recreate it. Again, you should back up your data on your computer beforehand.

1. Press the "Windows" and "R" keys simultaneously so that the "Execute" command opens.
2. Enter "diskmgmt.msc" here and confirm with "OK". Then the data carrier management opens here.
3. If you select your external hard drive at the top, you will see all of the associated partitions at the bottom. As a rule, the hard disk consists of only one partition.
4. With a right click you can "delete volume". You can then "create volume" or "expand volume". Assign the complete storage space to the volume here.

In the next practical tip, we will show you how to create a hard disk partition under Windows.