Files reporting 50GB of space less than it should; Steam reporting 46 GB less even than that
I'm using Linux Mint. I have Steam installed on the same partition as the OS. I added a new 1TB SSD to the system and formatted it, so it's hypothetically completely blank now. There's nothing in the lost+found folder, and I have hidden files set to visible, and there's nothing there. From the Steam settings, going down to Storage, I created a new Steam library folder on this SSD. No installing anything, just creating a new folder. And here's where my trouble started: Steam says that the drive is 915 GB in size, with 869 GB free. And it says that there are 46.59 GB of non-Steam content on this drive. This shouldn't be possible as far as I can tell - not only is it not reading the actual capacity of the drive, but it's reading non-Steam content that doesn't exist.
I was already aware that storage space numbers varied because of Gibibyte to Gigabyte conversions, but this didn't seem right even when you accounted for that, so I carefully went over everything I could find on my PC and noted down the following:
- The Disks utility reports the size of the drive as being 1,000,204,886,016 bytes, which works out to be 931.51 Gibibytes, or 1000.20 Gigabytes.
- GParted says the size of the drive is 931.51 Gibibytes, which tracks with the Disks utility. It also says there are 15.70 Gibibytes used, which is roughly 1.686% of the disk; the Disks utility also says the disk is 1.7% full, so that tracks as well. This is expected behavior -- 1% to 5% of the available space is reserved for the functionality of the filesystem, so 1.7% is well within bounds.
- The Disks utility also says that the drive has 983 Gigabytes free. 15.70 Gibibytes is 16.858 Gigabytes -- 1,000 GB minus 16.858 GB equals ~983 GB, so that tracks.
- So to summarize up to this point: GParted says that the usable space is 915.82 Gibibytes, Disks says the usable space is 983 Gigabytes. These are the same amounts, counted differently, so everything is fine so far.
- Here's where things start not making sense. The filesystem itself -- when you click the "Files" button and then navigate to the mounted hard drive -- says it has 933.3 Gigabytes free. It's lost 50 GB somewhere.
- Steam says that the size of the drive is 915.8 GB -- if we assume Steam can only see the size of the drive besides the 15.70GiB/16.858GB reserved by the file system, this would be accurate for the GiB amount, except that it specifically says GB and not GiB. Is this just a case of Steam having a fairly major typo, by leaving out the i?
- Even if we allow for Steam saying GB when it means to say GiB, Steam says that there are 46.59 X of non-Steam files. Either way, GB or GiB, this doesn't make sense. None of the resulting numbers correspond with anything reported by any other system.
TL;DR: The filesystem is missing 50 GB somewhere, Steam might be reporting the wrong kind of numbers, Steam might not look at the physical capacity of a drive, and Steam is still reporting a significant quantity of non-Steam files that don't exist.