Downloading to flash drive, internal drive fills up. Tr 1.54

[strongclad]

I used my 16GB USB thumb drive as the download point for a few torrents and let Transmission run overnight. The next morning I checked the status and was told that the internal HDD of my PowerBook G4 was almost full. My HDD only had a few gigs of storage left anyway--the torrents I downloaded were 1 to 2 gigs apiece. I would like to reclaim the consumed space and find a way to stop this from recurring if possible. I'm not sure if this is some sort of cache file that's growing and consuming space, and apart from that I can't figure out what folder on my drive grew.

I decided to check through Finder to see what my HDD usage is like and I get this from using "Get Info" on the drive:
Capacity: 62.41 GB (my 80GB HDD is partitioned)
Available: 1.75 GB

What's more odd is that using "Get Info" on my "Home" folder shows a size of 44.96 GB. I know that this number probably excludes certain other data on the partition, but what else could be consuming around 17GB of space? I'm sure that OS X system files are using some of this space, but it couldn't be using that many gigs.

I searched and found a couple of threads complaining of the same issue, but no one seemed to have a solution. One mentioned checking "/Volumes" to see if there was a copy of the external volume there, stating that if an external volume is interrupted or somehow disconnected at some point during the downloading process, a new volume of the same name might show up there. The only thing I found was an alias to my current partition.

I'm using Tiger 10.4.11 and Transmission 1.54. Thanks in advance for any info you may have

[Jethryn Freyman]

Download a program called "WhatSize". It shows where your disk space is going.

[strongclad]

thanks for the reply and the recommendation. I found a free program called Disk Inventory X, so I'm going to try that first. WhatSize is shareware and has a search limit of 20GB unless I want to spend $12.