Build Complete I have a parts kit picked out, but I want some input from The Collective!

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mikeymikec

Lifer
May 19, 2011
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How much space is your OS taking up? Even my work laptop that has WAY more programs than my gaming PC and stores ~100GB of Drop Box files and email at any given time and it still has 200GB of a 500GB drive free.

+1. 64GB for a Windows 10/11 install even over the course of a decade has been pretty safe; 32GB at a push but I wouldn't regard it as completely safe (e.g. big-name OEM OS installs are bloaty).

I wonder if the reason for n00ky's opinion was say a Steam install in C:\Program Files, some anomaly caused by extra software in any case; for example yesterday was the second occasion I spotted an Office365 'OfficeFileCache' folder containing ~200k files!

Another possibility is a large % of C drive allocated to System Restore, though these days the concern with SR tends to be the opposite, double-check it's even properly configured / has any % allocated.
 

nOOky

Diamond Member
Aug 17, 2004
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I choose a larger OS drive as I like to keep a bunch of photos on it as well as some, not all, of my STEAM installs. Plus going from 500gb to 1tb isn't a huge monetary stretch, at least to me anyway.
 
Dec 10, 2005
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I choose a larger OS drive as I like to keep a bunch of photos on it as well as some, not all, of my STEAM installs. Plus going from 500gb to 1tb isn't a huge monetary stretch, at least to me anyway.
I have 2 TB NVME for my OS drive, and another 2 TB NVME to serve as a backup drive for my personal files (lots of music and photos) and secondary install location for Steam. But on my wife's computer, we went with a 1 TB NVME OS drive, and she has an older 500 GB SATA SSD (that used to be the OS drive) to act as a secondary Steam install location. My wife uses Spotify and doesn't have a ton of photos on her computer, so her personal data storage needs are much lower than mine.

At the end of the day, it all really depends on your personal use cases, how much personal data you have, what kinds of programs you install... Though, it's easy to step up to a 1 TB minimum for not a high cost.
 
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mikeymikec

Lifer
May 19, 2011
21,115
16,321
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I choose a larger OS drive as I like to keep a bunch of photos on it as well as some, not all, of my STEAM installs. Plus going from 500gb to 1tb isn't a huge monetary stretch, at least to me anyway.

Hopefully you're aware that it's trivially easy to tell Windows to store say your Documents/Pictures/Desktop/Downloads/Music folders to any location you like (right-click on folder, location tab, move folder).
 

nOOky

Diamond Member
Aug 17, 2004
3,277
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Hopefully you're aware that it's trivially easy to tell Windows to store say your Documents/Pictures/Desktop/Downloads/Music folders to any location you like (right-click on folder, location tab, move folder).
lol yea. But I keep my documents backed up all the time on an internal storage drive, in case the OS or storage drive fails. I do this because I don't have to manually do any saving of stuff I wish to keep except to plug in an external storage drive every so often and backing everything up.