Some drives on desktop don't show free space

Aug 30, '06 07:30:02AM

Contributed by: luomat

I was looking at my desktop and noticed that some of the drives show the total space and free space, but some only show the total space, as seen in the image at right. It took me a few moments to figure out why this was happening: the drives which only show the total size are formatted in NTFS, and therefore are mounted read-only.

Any read-only drives will only show the total space, and not free space. This seems a little strange, since I might want to know how much available space I have, even on a hard drive mounted read-only. With some read-only media such as CD-ROMs, it wouldn't make sense to show "available space," but for hard drives, I wish it was available.

Tip within a tip: Unix geeks can go into Terminal.app and run /bin/df -h, which will show total size, space used, and space available for even a read-only disk.

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