Invisible data hogging SSD space?

[d33pblue]

I've had my Win7 64 bit install on my Intel X25m 80GB SSD for maybe a year and a half now with no problems. One thing I've noticed is that my space keeps getting slowly eaten away for no apparent reason at all. I'm not putting anything else on the drive or installing any new programs that would account for the lost space.

If I check the "properties" of my C drive it shows 56.8GB used.
If I open up my C drive, select all of the folders (including the invisible ones), and check the properties, it only makes up 46.8GB

Where is the other 10GB of data? Any idea what is going on here?

 

[Anonemous]

I've had my Win7 64 bit install on my Intel X25m 80GB SSD for maybe a year and a half now with no problems. One thing I've noticed is that my space keeps getting slowly eaten away for no apparent reason at all. I'm not putting anything else on the drive or installing any new programs that would account for the lost space.

If I check the "properties" of my C drive it shows 56.8GB used.
If I open up my C drive, select all of the folders (including the invisible ones), and check the properties, it only makes up 46.8GB

Where is the other 10GB of data? Any idea what is going on here?

System restore, hibernation could slowly eat up 10 gigs. Have you shut those down?

 

[lsv]

Page file as well, if you have more than 8gigs of ram you could reduce the size or consider turning off your page file.

 

[pitz]

Yup, when you upgrade from 4gb or even 8gb of RAM to 16gb of RAM -- and you want to use a hibernation mode -- a much larger file on the SSD needs to be allocated.

There are log files that are held by Windows as well. Sometimes updates are downloaded first and stored in various temporary file folders (depending on the software). If you install and then uninstall some software, it doesn't completely uninstall.

Windows Update also has the effect of growing the size footprint of an operating system. This is quite dramatic on WindowsXP; an old P3-450 with a 10gb hard drive could easily run WindowsXP, Office 2003, etc. back in 2001/2002 when WinXP was released. These days, with just the software pushed out by Windows Update, you'd be hard pressed to run it on a machine with twice the specs!

 

[Sunburn74]

Whats really happening is file corruption as the discrepancy between what is held and what is shown. If you frequently lose power, or shut off your PC without a shutdown, and etc it happens over time.

Run windows disk check with the file recovery option and you may be surprised at how much you get back. With my seagate storage drive I recovered 200gb and I believe my SSD raid setup got like 7-10gb back.

 

[jiffylube1024]

Whats really happening is file corruption as the discrepancy between what is held and what is shown. If you frequently lose power, or shut off your PC without a shutdown, and etc it happens over time.

Run windows disk check with the file recovery option and you may be surprised at how much you get back. With my seagate storage drive I recovered 200gb and I believe my SSD raid setup got like 7-10gb back.

It's not just that - it's probably also the pagefile (1-2GB) and hibernation RAM backup (equal to your RAM size unless you disable it).

 

[Nothinman]

Page file as well, if you have more than 8gigs of ram you could reduce the size or consider turning off your page file.

You should never consider turning off your pagefile with Windows. But you could reduce it to a gig or two to save space.

 

[lsv]

You should never consider turning off your pagefile with Windows. But you could reduce it to a gig or two to save space.

My page file is off, I have 12gigs of RAM. I've not had any issues since disabling my page file.

 

[Nothinman]

My page file is off, I have 12gigs of RAM. I've not had any issues since disabling my page file.

That doesn't mean it's smart. I may drive with my seatbelt off all of the time and haven't had a single wreck yet, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea.

 

[ThatsABigOne]

You should never consider turning off your pagefile with Windows. But you could reduce it to a gig or two to save space.

:whiste:

Why??

 

[Nothinman]

:whiste:

Why??

Because the VM system in Windows was designed with the assumption that one exists and problems may appear if you remove it. Windows has gotten better over the last few releases but it's still not a good idea to run without one. And you're just removing a safety net from the system so if a problem does appear it's affects will be exacerbated by your overzealous attempt to free up a minute amount of space.

 

[Coup27]

I think turning off the page file depends on the useage of the user. I have turned off page files on an Asus netbook which only had an 8GB primary SSD as installing Windows 7 on it became quite a space conscious task. Given what netbooks are used for, with the 2GB RAM in the system it never became a problem.

I have 8GB in my main system and I'm quite a light user. I have set my page file to initial size 1042MB and max 2048MB.

Back to topic, I agree with the recommendations to check hibernation, system restore and page file.

I would also download and run Ccleaner if you don't already.

 

[corkyg]

Another encroacher of free space in Win7 is Indexing. And a biggie are Temporary Internet Files. You need to clean out those temps periodically. Indexing is a service that you may appreciate if you do a lot of searching. And, in conjunction with System Restore, Shadow Copies are produced and they can grow.

 

[LokutusofBorg]

Nobody has mentioned Recycle Bin? Would the overall disk usage number include whatever's in Recycle Bin, but when you just select everything on the drive, you wouldn't get Recycle Bin files, so it'd be a lower number?

If you had hidden and system files visible when you manually selected everything and looked at properties, I would think it would have included page file, hibernation file, everything like that. But would it have included System Restore files? Not sure. Recycle Bin files? Not sure.

 

[lsv]

That doesn't mean it's smart. I may drive with my seatbelt off all of the time and haven't had a single wreck yet, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea.

Are you really comparing page file use to wearing a seat belt? Well I better re-enable it before my computer crashes into the side of a farmers market.

 

[code65536]

Because the VM system in Windows was designed with the assumption that one exists and problems may appear if you remove it. Windows has gotten better over the last few releases but it's still not a good idea to run without one. And you're just removing a safety net from the system so if a problem does appear it's affects will be exacerbated by your overzealous attempt to free up a minute amount of space.

And do you actually have evidence for this, or are you just perpetuating an old wive's tale? From a technical standpoint, what you say makes very little sense (only the memory manager has any sort of access to the pagefile, and the NT memory manager has been able to live without a pagefile since day one). Officially, the only thing you lose if you kill the pagefile is the ability to do a kernel crashdump (since in the event of a kernel crash, there is no guarantee that the file system drivers are still "alive", so all it can do is blindly dump data to a part of the disk that is known to be safe--the pagefile). If there are other side effects to killing the page file, I haven't heard of it (and I would be skeptical of it).

As for the OP's question, just turn on the option to show hidden files AND disable the option to hide system files (the first option shows files w/ the H attribute set, the latter option, in conjunction with the first, shows files with both H and S set), and then you can see exactly where everything is going.

 

[HeXen]

my drive needs house cleaning too

 

[Nothinman]

Are you really comparing page file use to wearing a seat belt? Well I better re-enable it before my computer crashes into the side of a farmers market.

Yes, I am. The consequences may be less dire (unless it's a medical PC or something) but the analogy is fine to me.

And do you actually have evidence for this, or are you just perpetuating an old wive's tale? From a technical standpoint, what you say makes very little sense (only the memory manager has any sort of access to the pagefile, and the NT memory manager has been able to live without a pagefile since day one). Officially, the only thing you lose if you kill the pagefile is the ability to do a kernel crashdump (since in the event of a kernel crash, there is no guarantee that the file system drivers are still "alive", so all it can do is blindly dump data to a part of the disk that is known to be safe--the pagefile). If there are other side effects to killing the page file, I haven't heard of it (and I would be skeptical of it).

As you're the one saying it's ok to disable a configuration option that MS enables by default I would think you would be the one with the burden of proof. Do you have anything written by MS that says running Windows without a pagefile is a supported or recommended configuration?

I understand the risk that you're talking about with regards to crash dump. If whatever bug happened to have messed with memory in use by the block, filesystem, elevator, etc then the results will be undetermined and possibly catastrophic. Which is one reason why most unix systems use(d) swap partitions instead of files, but that's all beside the point.

 

[d33pblue]

Thanks guys... I'll try a few of these things and see if it helps any.