I have my main SSD with Windows 11(24H2) installed on it (small older SSD with just 222GB of usable space). The OS install was upgraded from Windows 10 years ago.
On the other internal drive I've installed most other things, including games.
For quite a long time (at least a year), I've had an ongoing issue and I didn't know if it was a wider issue with Windows 11 or not.
Whenever I copy files, extract archives or install anything to the 2nd 1.8TB drive, the 'System reserved' space gradually increases, and I've seen it effectively double the amount of used space, for example after downloading a 150GB game, it could occupy around 300GB on the drive in total.
It seems to be a very tricky problem, and many other people have struggled with the Windows 'System reserved' space ballooning on either their Windows OS drive, or secondary internal drives. In my case, it does not effect the OS / C Drive.
Here is an example of the issue, which occurred while installing the latest Silent Hill 2 (2024) patch on Steam:
By the end of the install, it's expanded further:
This is the screen you can see when navigating from 'Storage Management' to 'Storage used on other drives', selecting a drive then selecting the 'System & reserved' category.
I've seen this grow to over 100GB, and it always shrinks back down to 1GB after a system restart, or unmounting and remounting the 1.8TB drive.
I have tried many things to resolve the problem, most recently I did a full repair of Windows 11 (Via the 'Fix problems using Windows Update' option , but the issue remains.
On the other internal drive I've installed most other things, including games.
For quite a long time (at least a year), I've had an ongoing issue and I didn't know if it was a wider issue with Windows 11 or not.
Whenever I copy files, extract archives or install anything to the 2nd 1.8TB drive, the 'System reserved' space gradually increases, and I've seen it effectively double the amount of used space, for example after downloading a 150GB game, it could occupy around 300GB on the drive in total.
It seems to be a very tricky problem, and many other people have struggled with the Windows 'System reserved' space ballooning on either their Windows OS drive, or secondary internal drives. In my case, it does not effect the OS / C Drive.
Here is an example of the issue, which occurred while installing the latest Silent Hill 2 (2024) patch on Steam:
By the end of the install, it's expanded further:
This is the screen you can see when navigating from 'Storage Management' to 'Storage used on other drives', selecting a drive then selecting the 'System & reserved' category.
I've seen this grow to over 100GB, and it always shrinks back down to 1GB after a system restart, or unmounting and remounting the 1.8TB drive.
I have tried many things to resolve the problem, most recently I did a full repair of Windows 11 (Via the 'Fix problems using Windows Update' option , but the issue remains.
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