Why do my external hard drives not free space when I delete things?

I have a Macbook Pro running Lion 10.7. I have a problem where my external hard drives tend not to free up space when I delete items from them. I have been resorting to regularly reformatting my drives for the pen drives, but now it is happening with my large backup drives. It happens for both OS-journaled and FAT-32 formatted disks. Any answers?
Update: I checked the hidden folders, and they comprise:
.feventsd
.Spotlight-V100
.Trashes
There are no sizes given for the hidden folders and it says I don't have persmission to see the contents of the trash.
Cheers,
Heather

When you move items to the trash, no space is freed since you're simply moving a file into a different folder (the .Trashes folder). When you empty the trash, the space will be freed. You must empty the trash while the external drive is connected for it to take effect.
Matt

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