SSD space going missing...

Digit · 11 Mar 2013 at 09:31

Ok so i recently got myself a 120Gb SSD and keep seeing chunks of it going missing. Last night i turned my PC on and had 86Gb of the drive space left. Then i happen to have a look an hour late (after doing nothing by the way) and noticed it was on 78Gb. Huh!

Anyway i have done all the usual on my system to prevent this such as set my TEMP/TMP folders to my E: drive. Also set page file up on my E: drive and any downloads go straight to this drive also. And system restore is set to 1% and currently only has two restore points saved.

Is this a normal thing for SSD's as my last mechanical HDD never did this even with all of the above set to it?

I have done the tweak with the WinSxS folder were you type a command at CMD prompt and that gave me back some of the missing space. But i don't want to have to be watching this drive all the time for nicking space...

Thanks in advance

Devrij · 11 Mar 2013 at 09:51

I'd be looking at your sxs folder to see if it's expanding. Are you installing lots of new software?

I can't say I've noticed the same thing happening with any of my SSDs in the past, so I'd be inclined to say it's your OS, not the media it's stored on. I don't think it would really have any effect, but I presume you have TRIM enabled?

Digit · 11 Mar 2013 at 10:03

Hi and thank you for the quick reply.

Like i said in my first post i have done the WinSxS tweak and that gave me some of the lost space back. But not all. So yes that is some of the missing space cause, but not all.

Also TRIM is indeed enabled.

I am also thinking it is Windows expansion but wasn't sure (which is why i am here asking) just curious as to why it would do this sort of thing on a SSD and not a Mechanical? And taking in to consideration as explained above that on my older mechanical drive all Temp and such went direct to it also. :confused:

marc2003 · 11 Mar 2013 at 11:37

Also set page file up on my E: drive

if that's mechanical, it defeats the point of having an SSD. keep it on the SSD but reduce the size to 2GB.

have you disabled hibernation? that takes as much space as ram you've got. open an elevated command prompt....

Code:

powercfg -h off

valkynaz · 11 Mar 2013 at 12:02

Use SpaceSniffer to see what sort of files/folders are taking up large amounts of storage:

http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-disk-space-analyzer.htm#SpaceSniffer

Gammawolf · 11 Mar 2013 at 12:05

I like to run WinDirStat to get a graphical representation of space utilization on individual files and folder structures, could help maybe track down any larger files?

Digit · 11 Mar 2013 at 12:24

marc2003 said:
if that's mechanical, it defeats the point of having an SSD. keep it on the SSD but reduce the size to 2GB.

have you disabled hibernation? that takes as much space as ram you've got. open an elevated command prompt....

Code:

powercfg -h off

Well i went off this tweak guide http://www.auslogics.com/en/articles/ssd-tweaks-to-increase-ssd-performance/ which does say under "Disable, move or reduce the page file" section it is best to move Page file to another drive were possible to cut down on write access i presume. Not that it should be a problem anyway as i have 8GB of ram in my system and i don't do anything major on my system to use anywhere near that amount.

Also yes, Hibernate is disabled completely right from the beginning.

valkynaz said:
Use SpaceSniffer to see what sort of files/folders are taking up large amounts of storage:

http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-disk-space-analyzer.htm#SpaceSniffer

Thanks for the link

Gammawolf said:
I like to run WinDirStat to get a graphical representation of space utilization on individual files and folder structures, could help maybe track down any larger files?

Thank you also. Something else to have a look at and check is always nice

marc2003 · 11 Mar 2013 at 12:31

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?

Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.

In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that

Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.

In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.

Digit · 11 Mar 2013 at 12:44

Aaahh good read there marc2003 and i shall put my Page file back to my SSD but reduced. Thanks

Still don't know why i am losing random space though. I will keep an eye on it today and see if it does it again.

Thanks all for the replies. All good stuff

Edit: Ok so i am trying to work out what to set my Page file to now "Initial Size" and "Maximum Size"? Like i said i have 8GB of system memory. A lot of what i read keeps saying that you ideally set it to twice the amount of system memory... That doesn't make any sense at all which is why i ask.

Edit 2: After some more research it seems that these day's Page file is very rarely used. And in a system with 8GB+ of memory will probably never be used. And has i stated earlier i don't use anything intensive enough on my system to come anywhere near close to using my 8GB worth of memory. So i don't see why moving the whole page file to another drive would do any harm when it isn't going to use it in the first place. But also if it is on another drive that space isn't being used up on my SSD. Please feel free to correct me on any of this theory.

Edit 3: Right, so i have set Initial size = 1024 and Maximum = 2048 on my SSD. All this sound ok?

Edit 4: Well i just found out where the other lost space had gone to. It was about 2GB worth of space and it was Dirt 3 that was the cause of it. It basically creates some sort of replay file on the system drive no matter where the game is installed and doesn't get rid of it after closing down the game. Used a program called "Directory Linker" to place these files for the Dirt 3 install directory for future use. Stupid game... lol

Thanks again