- Oct 9, 1999
- 31,516
- 167
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To make a long story short, over the last few months I noticed that my SSD was starting to fill up even though all I've done is install software and driver updates. After a bit of mucking around I found the culprit: the Windows DriverStore.
The DriverStore keeps old drivers for rollback purposes even if you uninstall a driver. As a result it keeps growing, and growing, and growing. In my case I've had my current install since I built my current Nehalem system in 2008. Meaning I've accumulated nearly 4 years of NVIDIA graphics drivers.
How much did 4 years of NVIDIA drivers take up? NVIDIA's latest drivers are nearly 200MB unpacked; altogether at about 10-15 drivers a year over 4 years, my DriverStore had 6GB of old NV drivers lying around. It's not an absolutely huge amount, but on a 128GB SSD that's 6GB I could have been using for an additional game or something similarly large.
So if you're a SSD user and are a driver addict like I am, clean out your DriverStore. You might just be surprised at how much space those old drivers are taking up.
The DriverStore keeps old drivers for rollback purposes even if you uninstall a driver. As a result it keeps growing, and growing, and growing. In my case I've had my current install since I built my current Nehalem system in 2008. Meaning I've accumulated nearly 4 years of NVIDIA graphics drivers.
How much did 4 years of NVIDIA drivers take up? NVIDIA's latest drivers are nearly 200MB unpacked; altogether at about 10-15 drivers a year over 4 years, my DriverStore had 6GB of old NV drivers lying around. It's not an absolutely huge amount, but on a 128GB SSD that's 6GB I could have been using for an additional game or something similarly large.
So if you're a SSD user and are a driver addict like I am, clean out your DriverStore. You might just be surprised at how much space those old drivers are taking up.