System & reserved files on a secondary drive?

Hi Sibro,

One of the questions we had for a newly formatted NTFS empty drive:

filesystems - Newly formatted (NTFS) external hard drive already has 'Used space'. What determines the used space's amount? Is it correlated to the HD's capacity? - Super User

Also, found this below on another web site.

The Disadvantages of an NTFS File System | Techwalla

High Space Overhead The NTFS file system requires a significant amount of "space overhead" to function. Space overhead is data storage space on a drive that is devoted to the file system itself and therefore cannot be used to store data. In other words, if you format a drive with the NTFS file system, you will lose some of the storage space. According to Microsoft, "space overhead is in the form of NTFS system files that typically use at least 4 MB of drive space on a 100 MB partition." This means that 4 percent or more of your drive space is lost due to the file system's needs. As a result, Microsoft recommends that users avoid working with the NTFS file system on drive volumes that are smaller than 400MB. Attempting to load NTFS on smaller storage devices such as USB flash drive and older hard drives may result in poor performance or inadequate storage space.

If I format the same drive with exFAT or FAT32 the used space is much less, but still not a file that you can see. �🤣🤣🤣

Here is the same empty drive just formatted as FAT32. 96 KB versus the 142 MB of NTFS. 😎

Hello, Sibro.o

Welcome to Microsoft Community.

Thanks for your inquiry, I think you may have questions about NTFS taking up a lot of space for system and file recovery.

I think your hard disk is in NTFS format

NTFS will take up additional space to save the recovered data when storing data. At least 4% of the space should be used

This is the basis of NTFS format reliability

Here are some technical documents for your reference

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/file-server/ntfs-overview?source=recommendations

These recovery information will also be displayed in the system&reserved project together with other system files.

I hope the above information can help you. If my understanding is wrong, please point it out, so that I can assist you better.

Lugoo Bei|Microsoft Community Support Specialist

Thanks for your contribution to the community!