Unallocated space is simply defined as the area or space on the hard drive of the computer that is available to write data to.  

The unallocated space is not viewable to the typical computer user and requires specialized computer forensic software to view and analyze.  Unallocated space can contain deleted files or partially deleted files.  When a file is deleted, the pointers to the file are removed, but the data remains in unallocated space until such time as the operating system stores another file in the same space, thereby over-writing the data.

A good analogy for what the content of unallocated space would look like is if two boxes of paper were tossed into the air and allowed to fall to the floor.  The first box would contain all documents written in the English language.  The second box would contain all documents written in a foreign language.  Someone would then collect all the paper and put the pages  into a larger box , unsorted in no particular order.  The English pages could be easily read, but the foreign language could not and the pages would be all jumbled together.   

Allocated or Active space is simply defined as the area or space on the hard drive the contains the operating system and user data (files) that are easily accessible to the computer user.

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