Hard drive almost full

lokiguesty

lokiguesty

lokiguesty

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Hi all

i currently have windows on a 60gb SSD and all my other stuff (as far as i know) on a large secondary drive

over time the windows build has got bigger and bigger and is now coming up as red in the my computer page because there is less than 5 gb available (actually shows 5.1gb remaining of 55gb dunno what happened to the other 5 gb's)

firstly does 50Gb seem big for a windows install? and secondly is there anyway to prune the info on the drive?

when i highlight the individual folders on the drive and count up the space used i can only account for about 30-35 gbs of data could 20gbs of data be in hidden files that i cant see?

i run microsoft security essentials and use firewall etc so im less worried about it being anything malicious just dont want to run out of space on the boot drive if i can help it.

any advise would be awsome
 
Have you ran Disk Cleanup yet?

The actual Windows installation will only take 15gb if using Win7/8, less for XP. That does not account for any SP installs or updates.
 
i think i found it, it suggests it can free up 3 gb of space and says there is 2.6 in temp files am i good to just let it dump all this stuff?
 
snips86x said:
The actual Windows installation will only take 15gb if using Win7
Click to expand...

Make that about 30 once you've done all the updates. I did a fresh install on the 1st of March.

yOxYBNC.png


The only other things I've installed other than updates and drivers are, ccleaner, defraggler, recuva, speccy, Firefox, Flash, exact audio copy and MP3 tag. EVE and Steam are on my RAID array as they take up nearly 12Gb themselves.

The only time I'd use a 60Gb SSD is on a Linux machine.
 
yeah OS takes a lot of space these days. Fresh install drive usage is no way indicative of what the computer will use once you've isntalled all the sorftware and have all sorts of caching going on.

128Gb is pretty much a minimum - I have a 18Gb ssd with all my documents stored on a mechanical drive as well as disabling the swap file (got 8GB ram).

If I was to replace the hard drive I'd go for 256GB now.
 
i checked about the page files, the pre set "let windows manage it" option seems to have my c drive (ssd) as no page file, and my D drive (mechanicla drive) as system managed file

does this mean the page file is already set to be on the larger drive? i never set it to do this but if its already set right then great
 
lokiguesty said:
i checked about the page files, the pre set "let windows manage it" option seems to have my c drive (ssd) as no page file, and my D drive (mechanicla drive) as system managed file

does this mean the page file is already set to be on the larger drive? i never set it to do this but if its already set right then great
Click to expand...

Go to folder options and untick what I've drawn around in red and click apply.

waEC44x.png


Then go to your folder view and look to see if the following files (in the red square) exist on your C: drive. If they're not there, check the other drive. They'll be on one or the other.

FGckvVL.png


As edscdk said you can probably get away with disabling hibernate. But you don't really want to disable pagesys, since it's debatable that it actually improves performance and it provides data dump abilities if something craps out. You can however move pagesys to your other drive (which is what I do, the screens above are for educational purposes).

And to hide the files again, just open folder view, retick those boxes, click apply and they'll all be gone.
 
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Also have a look for the winsxs folder, you'll see that its massive but you can't do a thing about it without screwing Windows.
 
It's not as big as a 'looks' a large bulk of it is hardlinks, don't even bother opening the winsxs folder because you can trash your system by changing things in there.
 
Let's not forget the windows.old folder if it was an upgrade.

I've found the way you can search for files from Explorer using the size: enormous tag or whatever it's called is helpful.
 
Everyone will argue till they are blue in the face about the pagefile but I've limited mine to 1000mb for years now and never seen an issue.
 
From a admin command prompt type "powercfg -h off" without the "" marks this will turn the hibernation off, you can still do standby etc, this will reclaim an amount of disk space equal to the amount of RAM you have installed.

We use space monger in work to look for stuff sucking up space on our fileservers, also if you have iTunes all the apps will be stored on the C: some where
 
dougal1331 said:
Make sure Windows isn't using a swap file (virtual memory) on the SSD. If it is, change it to use the HDD instead.
Click to expand...

edscdk said:
would that not hit performance?
Click to expand...

If you're continually reading from the paging file and therefore causing an excessive amount of hard page faults due to a lack of physical memory, in those circumstances, having the paging file on the fastest disk available would obviously be better than if it resides on a slower disk.

However, in cases where you have a sufficient amount of physical memory in relation to the workload which you're running, everything in your performance interest will be resident in physical memory and you won't be reading from the paging file to the point whereby it effects the performance of your system.

Reading from the paging file and / or mapped files, which whilst results in hard page faults, isn't an issue in-itself, it's the excessive amount of those operations which starts causing problems.

That is my understanding of things anyway. I am always very interested in learning more about this particular subject.

ManCuBuS said:
Everyone will argue till they are blue in the face about the pagefile but I've limited mine to 1000mb for years now and never seen an issue.
Click to expand...

Assuming the system commit limit, which is the sum of most of physical memory plus the size of the paging file(s), is large enough to support the system committed virtual memory requirements of the processes which you run, there isn't any reason why you would experience any issues. Having a paging file is certainly beneficial, but it is by no means a requirement in order for Windows to function properly. :)
 
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