Deleted files not relinquishing their disk space

My system has recently developed an issue that I've never encountered before, and having come to the limits of my own knowledge of OSX I am now hoping somebody on here is able to help me with the problem.
I have a CD 2.16ghz MBP running Leopard 10.5.5. Connected to the FW400 port on the Machine is a 500GB WD Mybook external drive, evenly split into 2 partitions -one of which I am using as my Time Machine backup drive, and the other partition which I've labelled Storage. The Storage partition has started to cause me some headaches. The partition is about 230 GB in size and contains a number of large DMG files (SuperDuper backups of my home directory and the like), and currently only has about 30GB of free space. When I now delete anything off this drive, instead of being moved to the trash it is instantly deleted. I have seen this behaviour once or twice in the past, but this time round I wasn't presented with the standard warning that deleting my files would be effectively instant. On top of this - and this is the real problem - the disk space used by that file is not relinquished back to the disk upon deletion. I have recently deleted about 70GB of files from the partition and whilst they have gone, I have not seen any more drive space made available to me in the Finder info bar or Get Info.
So far I've used a 3rd party util called Disk Inventory X to see how the partitions space is allocated, and I can't see anything untoward in there (such as a large hidden folder containing my trashes), I've inspected the .Trash folder on the partition and confirmed it is empty, and I've unplugged and re-mounted the drive, all to no avail. I've doulble checked I have ownership of my .Trahs files, and that all seems to be in order, and that's about the extent of my expertise - I can't think of anything else to do to get to the bottom of this issue short of backing up all the files onto another volume and re-formatting the partition. Given the amount of time this will take I really want to leave this as a last resort.
If anybody can help shed any light on this issue for me I would be incredibly grateful.
Thanks in advance

Update: I was previously unable to try "Secure Empty Trash" because Finder showed my Trash as empty. However, after deleting a file from my Home folder (so that the Trash icon now shows there's stuff there to be emptied), I have tried Secure Empty Trash again and it looks like Finder has begun the slow process of wiping about 70GB from my external partition.
While this may have solved the issue for the time being, I am concerned that this behaviour will continue, so if anybody has encountered this issue before and knows how to deal with it, I'd still very much welcome your input.

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