The mystery of the rapidly shrinking SSD disk space: A happy ending

[kdubbs]

[FONT=&quot]Like many of you who were relatively early SSD adopters on a budget, I opted for the Kingston [FONT=&quot]SNV125 40GB about a year and a half ago. It was a nice boost for my aging C2D system from ’06 which is still kicking today.[/FONT][/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]Obviously w/ only 40GB, space is at a premium. I basically only have win7 64, ms office, and a bunch of standard utilities, with all data/games on separate spindle drives. As of a week ago, I noticed that my normally comfortable 8-10 GB of free space had been reduced to a mere 500 MB. What gives
[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]After checking the usual suspects (shadow copies, Picasa thumbnails, etc.) I was at a loss. Win Dir Stat was only partially helpful, showing windows taking up its customary 16GB. But all the data did not add up to ~37GB like it should, but was 13GB short. So I enabled “show unknown” and sure enough there was 13GB of something on there. [/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]Running Win Dir Stat as an admin is key, because that showed me that the unknown was actually known and that the culprit was ~800,000 jpg files! A ton of pr0n you say? Wrong! Stupid Windows Media Player had amassed album art from virtually every album ever. Of course disabling album art did not delete the files—nice one, MS. After finding and changing permissions on all 800K files, I was able to delete them and live happily ever after. I hope you have enjoyed my story of triumph and will find this info useful if you find your precious HD space mysteriously disappearing. [/FONT]

 

[groberts101]

Gotta love Windows,eh? Glad to hear you sorted it out.

 

[allthatisman]

Yet another reason to hate media player, lol. Also, another cool utility for this is a program called Spacesniffer. It graphically maps out what programs are using space on a particular drive. Really helps to see who the "space culprits" are. ;-)

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

F'ing HATE wmp because of crap like that.. it's total spyware on our pcs too IMO

 

[VirtualLarry]

[FONT=&quot]Running Win Dir Stat as an admin is key, because that showed me that the unknown was actually known and that the culprit was ~800,000 jpg files! A ton of pr0n you say? Wrong! Stupid Windows Media Player had amassed album art from virtually every album ever. Of course disabling album art did not delete the files—nice one, MS. After finding and changing permissions on all 800K files, I was able to delete them and live happily ever after. I hope you have enjoyed my story of triumph and will find this info useful if you find your precious HD space mysteriously disappearing. [/FONT]

Do you really have 800,000 albums worth of music? Are you telling me that WMP goes out on the internet and downloads 13GB worth of album art for some reason? That's bizarre and absurd. But possibly not untrue. I'll have to watch for that. I don't use WMP, I guess that's just one more reason not to.

 

[Hyperlite]

SequioaView FTW.

 

[kdubbs]

Yes, it is absolutely ridiculous. I have maybe 6500 songs on that computer. 800K is a staggering amount of images. To put it in perspective, iTunes has roughly 13 million songs. I realize they aren't all from albums, but even if you figure 10 songs per album, that is 1.3 million albums, so basically, I had half the entire iTunes art catalog on my computer. :hmm:

I do have Zune Pass (go ahead and mock me, I like it alot), so maybe there is some weird glitch where WMP thinks that the Zune Pass catalog is actually resident on my computer and retrieves the art for local storage.

This doesn't appear to be widespread issue, as google searches don't return much on the subject.

The directory path that the images were stored under was also strange. I'll post it when I get home.

 

[kdubbs]

C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\NetworkService\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player\Art Cache\LocalMLS

And it's building up again. Deleted everything Thursday night, back up to 12,500 files and 500 MB of disk space. Lovely. Interestingly, there are multiple copies of each file, maybe 50 to 60, each with different Last Change information. Some are "updated" every 3 minutes or so, others take hours, but the old, identical versions are not overwritten.

Goodbye, WMP 12. You were a huge PITA.

 

[cytoSiN]

WMP is the devil incarnate. The answer to your prayers.

 

[Drsignguy]

Isn't there places in the options menu to shut that crap off? If I remember correctly, there are options to not even turn on those options when installed. I think one is called "Display media info from internet" and another is "update my music files Blah Blah Blah from the internet" etc...So, are there are other ways that wmp is adding through the firewall? Hmmm, makes you wonder.

 

[Voo]

Actually iirc (don't use it) you have to TELL it to download album art, so if MP is spyware it's by far the politest out there

Just disable the options as Drsignguy says or use a different player (VLC or CCCP+MPC would be the usual suspects on windows)

 

[darckhart]

@allthatisman: oo nice recommendation. i was using windirstat, but spacesniffer is great too!

 

[Hyperlite]

WMP is the devil incarnate. The answer to your prayers.

ok this is OT, but how do you get VLC to function in any capacity that even remotely resembles the music interface offered by WMP???

 

[Voo]

ok this is OT, but how do you get VLC to function in any capacity that even remotely resembles the music interface offered by WMP???

You don't, but there are fine alternatives for that too. I personally even see it as an advantage to differentiate between the two, but that's a matter of taste.

 

[Hyperlite]

You don't, but there are fine alternatives for that too. I personally even see it as an advantage to differentiate between the two, but that's a matter of taste.

Oh i agree, VLC has always been my player of choice for video. I have just yet to find another program that, despite its quirks, is as simple and functional for plain old music library playback as WMP. I'm certainly open to suggestions! It's probably been a year since i revisited mediamonkey or songbird, maybe i'll give them another shot.

 

[Voo]

Oh i agree, VLC has always been my player of choice for video. I have just yet to find another program that, despite its quirks, is as simple and functional for plain old music library playback as WMP. I'm certainly open to suggestions! It's probably been a year since i revisited mediamonkey or songbird, maybe i'll give them another shot.

Well I personally still use Winamp (and amarok under linux, but that's really only because it's already installed *cough*lazy), but that has more to do with the simple fact that it does all I want from it (which honestly isn't much - list artists and their albums, create playlists, search and can tune into webradio), I've configured the global shortcuts for it as I see fit and have written a few minimalistic plugins for stuff I wanted.

But then it feels quite bloated and surely isn't especially fast - the few times I had to use WMP I must say it certainly got a whole lot better than I remember it (v8 or 9 whatever came with XP was a catastrophe though )

 

[Hyperlite]

Well I personally still use Winamp (and amarok under linux, but that's really only because it's already installed *cough*lazy), but that has more to do with the simple fact that it does all I want from it (which honestly isn't much - list artists and their albums, create playlists, search and can tune into webradio), I've configured the global shortcuts for it as I see fit and have written a few minimalistic plugins for stuff I wanted.

But then it feels quite bloated and surely isn't especially fast - the few times I had to use WMP I must say it certainly got a whole lot better than I remember it (v8 or 9 whatever came with XP was a catastrophe though )

oooo been a long time since i've played with winamp. thanks for the response. The issue the OP is having is certainly weird...but i've got wmp tweaked for FLAC and some enhanced tag support, and deviantart has a pretty decent selection of themes to do away with that gawd-awful bright blue...i've been decently happy with it overall, but i'll never pass up something better.

 

[cytoSiN]

Well I personally still use Winamp

This. Winamp's music-library functionality has come a LONG way since the good old days (read: the mid-late 90s, when Winamp was the only game in town), and it still lets you use the old 2.9x skins for that old-school look. Between Winamp and VLC, I really don't need anything else for media playback these days.

 

[HeXen]

i love WMP, never had such an issue on my 60 gig SSD

 

[StinkyPinky]

I hate how Windows does certain things. Like save games. They're all over the place. Some in appdata, some in Saved Games, some in My Documents...blah.

 

[Voo]

I hate how Windows does certain things. Like save games. They're all over the place. Some in appdata, some in Saved Games, some in My Documents...blah.

Yeah that's totally windows fault! Since they introduced the SaveGame API which randomly saves files in whatever folder it sees fit, everything's gone to hell xX

Sometimes it really seems like people can't distinguish between 3rd party developers and the Windows Kernel

 

[kmmatney]

WMP is the devil incarnate. The answer to your prayers.

For a music collection, I would recommend Songbird over VideoLan. VideoLan is great for watching movies and such, but you need something like Songbird to organize a music collection. I think if you have ZunePass your probably stuck with WMP, though.

 

[Ben90]

Foobar2000 for music.

/thread

 

[Drsignguy]

I hate how Windows does certain things. Like save games. They're all over the place. Some in appdata, some in Saved Games, some in My Documents...blah.

This was the first thing that drove me nuts. Personally, I like to keep most things on my rigs organized, especially since the installation of the SSD's.

 

[HeXen]

Blame developers for disorganization. Blame MS for allowing it. They need an Appstore only for apps that meet certain standards for installation and execution, something people can go to and know its not going to clutter Registry, put files wherever..etc.