Inaccurate download amount?

[djdkdigital]

Hi everyone,

I'm relatively new to the utorrent Community, so I'm sorry if I've asked something that's already been covered before. My issue doesn't directly relate to uTorrent (at least as far as I can tell), but maybe you can guide me in the right direction anyways.

Currently I've been downloading a torrent through uTorrent on Windows. I find that although the program appears to accurate state how much I have already downloaded of the torrent, when I right-click and select 'Open Containing Folder', the total size of the folder is considerably larger! As an additional result, this essentially makes Windows "believe" that hard disk space is being used. Maybe it is, but I really have no idea what I could have already downloaded that essentially clogs up all that space in such a short period. I can see this huge size immediately after beginning my download by viewing the Properties of that folder.

I'm not sure if this relates to just the one specific torrent I'm dealing with, but I was prompted to find out where all of my disk space was going when I noticed a similar behavior on Mac OS X occuring when I used Azureus's Vuze torrent client, so I'm half tempted to think its an issue with just one torrent I've been dealing with. Either way however, its strange to just see file space disappearing like that when, apparently, I really haven't downloaded that much.

Thanks to all for your thoughts and feedback,

Derek

[Ultima]

µTorrent allocates the full size of each file it writes to on disk. If you have Preferences > General > "Pre-allocate all files" checked, it'll allocate the full size of the entire torrent before it even downloads anything. Why would it do any of this? To prevent/minimize disk fragmentation.

You're going to need however much space it's already allocated to store the files sooner or later anyway, so why would you want it to pretend it won't need that much?

At any rate, if you really don't want this behavior, make sure the above-mentioned option is unchecked, and set Preferences > Advanced > diskio.sparse_files to true.