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SSD slowly filling up - not sure why

Stg-Flame

Stg-Flame

Diamond Member
My OS (Win7 64) is installed on my smaller 128GB Samsung SSD and for the last month or so, it's been slowly filling up to the point where I have less than 10GB left. When I first started noticing my space depleting I had well over 50GB of space available.

I've used WinDirStat to see what folders are occupying the most space and it seems Windows and <Files> are taking up the most space. Inside Windows, the biggest folder is winsxs with Backup leading the size in that directory. Under <Files>, pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys are taking up a ridiculous amount of space (almost 20GB between the two). The other files inside <Files> are less than 1MB.

If it matters, I also have a 2TB storage drive for music, movies, video game backups, and all downloads go to that location (my Oblivion and New Vegas mod folders are taking up a quarter of the total space haha). On top of the storage HDD, I have a 256GB Samsung SSD strictly for Steam.

Is there a particular reason my OS drive is filling up? I've been downloading a lot of mods lately for Fallout 3 and New Vegas (Tales of Two Wastelands among others) while waiting for FO4, but as I stated, my downloads go to my storage drive and they are installed on my Steam drive.

I've never used SSDs before this build and so far they are still going strong after four years, but I've read too many horror stories about SSDs just failing with little to no warning and I really don't want to lose whats on those drives (to be honest, nobody would). I am going to go pick up external drive today so I can start backing up my files, but I've been building computers since 2004 and I've never seen this happen, nor have I had a drive fail me yet.

Any information is greatly appreciated.
 
Check "System Restore" & see if there are many restore points.
You can also turn off hibernation using this command.
Code: 
powercfg -h off
 
The page file size will be equal to the size of your RAM. Now if you have 8GB+ of RAM it's not likely you will need 8GB+ of reserved page file as well. I have 8GB of RAM and I have set my page file to custom with 1024-2048MB as the settings and I have never ran into an issue.

I also disable system restore. I find system restore to be totally useless and when I have used it on other peoples machines it's never managed to restore it anyway. If you don't use hibernation you can also disable (as above) that as that'll be another waste of RAM sized space.

Clearing out the Windows update history and service pack backups (also above) will gain you some space back.
 
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Stg-Flame:

Do you use Avast anti-virus?

It is known to have a bug that interferes with your System Restore settings, and therefore chews up a lot of space. I haven't heard that the bug has been fixed.
 
Thanks for the responses.

I disable System Restore the moment my OS loads, so there shouldn't be any restore points being made. I'll try the hibernate line and see if that helps at all.

As for Avast, I do use it, but if I don't have System Restore enabled, would that still affect my PC?
 
The good thing about winsxs is that it is not real space being used, just hard links. The bad part is that the NTFS file system does not how to tell the difference, so they will always appear to use space. Don't delete anything from this directory.

In addition to Disk Cleanup, CCleaner can be a help here.

Are you using Windows Backup? Make sure it isn't writing to your SSD.

Do you run a local email program? Make sure that file isn't getting to big.

Have you ever cleaned out your Internet browser cache? They can get large too.

Since you have an SSD, feel free to set the page file manually and make it smaller. And disable hibernation as noted.

Out of curiosity, what is the total size of your Windows directory? What about Program Files and Program Files (x86)?
 
I've used CCleaner in the past and it did free up some space as did clearing all my browser cache, but was a negligible amount. I'm not using Windows Backup nor do I use any local email programs. I'll look into setting the page file manually as that was suggested around the time I built this computer and people were giving me advice for SSDs - I guess I forgot about this during the excitement when I built this four years ago (plus one of my GPUs was DoA, so that took my mind off tweaking the build).

Windows is showing at 26.3GB
Program Files at 4.5GB
Program Files (x86) at 5.6GB.
 
So, what is taking up the rest of your space? I ask this because this is what my math gets me:

Windows = 26.3
PF 4.5+5.6= 10.1
pagefile = 8.0
hibernate = 8.0
Total = 52.4 GB

So is the other 63 GB (115-52) in the User folders, or somewhere else?
 
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When you deleted a file, windows will only mark the file as deleted but saves it in the shadow file area. This way you can undelete the file later on. But the problem is with SSD's this does end up taking a lot of space. Many programs dont allow you to look into this area. But windows XP explorer is one of the few programs that allow you to see the files and size. Usually turning off system restore will delete these saved files.

You could use AOMEI Backupper Standard Edition which is free, and it compresses the entire drive and saves it in a single file to restore.. My own windows partition runs to like 20GB even though on a 70GB partition it only has 10GB free so it did save a lot of space.. windows backup saves a whole bunch of files and difficult to manage. both programs seems to have a mount point so you could map the image file to a drive and then copy files you need from it but having a single file makes it far easier to move them where you want and stuff.
 
Thanks for all the advice thus far, but I got called to work late last night to go out of town. Trying to post this from my phone before I have no service, but I'll check everything out when I get back. Doing all the little things that people have suggested has freed up a decent amount of space and I'm sure the hibernate, temp files, CCleaner, and browser cache were what was depleting my space, but I believe what is taking up the largest chunk of space is an old download location I temporarily used for mods. I used to have a temp folder I would download to, then extract the files directly to the directories, then I would just delete the temp folder, but I'm not 100% certain that I deleted the temp folder.

Thanks again for all the help thus far, I was getting a bit worried seeing my available space in the red.
 
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