SSD reports that it is full, but when I look at files it's only half full

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allen5055

[H]ard|Gawd
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I have a Mushkin Chronos Deluxe Enhanced 240GB. It runs fairly empty and only has Windows and Titanfall on it. There's about 100-110GB of data on there. Recently it's been reporting that it's completely full. I ran disk cleanup, made sure hibernation was disabled, checked to see if TRIM was on. I ran WinDirStat and it also reports that there's only 110GB of files. I enabled hidden files view of course.

Why is my drive being reported as half full?
 
Did you check how big the partition is?

Sometimes the partition on ssds is made smaller than the drive on purpose to make the drive last longer.
 
Would you be able to post a screenshot of when it reports that it's completely full?
 
Please post a screenshot of the properties window of your C: drive and of the partition manager.
 
I moved Titanfall to the other disk. Still, WinDirStat reports that there's only 40GB of data, yet the drive is almost full now. I checked the partition size and it's 240GB.

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hmm id suspect some king of ntfs problem, try running chkdsk c: /f from the command prompt.

might fix it unless the mft has grown very big or theres some hard links on the ssd (two things I remember off the top of my head that could cause missing space). forgot about alternate data streams :- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS#Alternate_data_streams_.28ADS.29 , might be worth checking with sysinternals streams http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897440.aspx

if theres not much installed on the ssd id probably reinstall windows after formatting the ssd if chkdsk didn't fix the problem.
 
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You should enable 'show hidden files and folders' as well as disable 'hide protected operating system files' in Tools > Folder Options, in explorer.

Maybe you have a massive pagefile or hibernation file or something?
 
MarkL said:
You should enable 'show hidden files and folders' as well as disable 'hide protected operating system files' in Tools > Folder Options, in explorer.

Maybe you have a massive pagefile or hibernation file or something?
Click to expand...

When I show the protected system files it still only reports 40GB on there.

I disabled hibernation in Windows and from CMD.
 
Exactly where are you receiving the error message? The System Tray? Please post a pic of your Windows Disk Management screen for this drive and make sure you have deleted old system restore points. Is this a system you built yourself or a mass-market PC? I have seen some machines where people enabled Windows Backup and it tried backing up to the same drive as the source. It created backup files which showed zero size even though they were huge. Are you logged in as admin? There could be folders that have insufficient/corrupt permissions which aren't being seen properly to add to your total. Just throwing out some ideas.
 
You're not letting windows save backup/restore images to your SSD are you?

Alos, there is a program called SpaceSniffer that will show directory sizes, it works pretty well. It can show you where the space is getting ate up.

edit: mwroobel beat me to it by a few seconds :) Def something you should check into.
 
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I built this machine about 2 years ago. I'm logged in as an admin.
 
Weird... Can you show a screenshot of the General tab for the properties of C:?

and double check the 'Quota' tab and make sure it's not on?
 
Can you do a screenshot of your C: with the system files shown etc now?

What about Disk Cleanup? Does it list anything?
I just ran that on my machine and it showed I had 7GB in the recycle bin which I didn't realize
 
Any chance your using Offline files, what about the swap file, by default its usually the size of the memory in your system (annoying on my 32GB of Ram Desktop with a 256GB SSD).
 
yes he could untick hide protected operating system files in the control panel/folder settings.

not sure the page file and system restore etc. would use that much space, but from the screen shots it looks like the page file etc. are hidden though.
 
Topweasel said:
Any chance your using Offline files, what about the swap file, by default its usually the size of the memory in your system (annoying on my 32GB of Ram Desktop with a 256GB SSD).
Click to expand...

I checked swap file size it's only like 1GB.

I looked at hidden protected OS files. I checked the restore points.
 
allen5055 said:
Hm the computer isn't a server though.
Click to expand...

Doesn't matter, what I wrote in that thread applies here:

Snowknight26 said:
WinDirStat won't show you everything because by default the Administrator group does not have permission to read every folder or list its contents (so the space is wrong), hence why System Volume Information shows up as 0 bytes. I'm sure there are a few more instances of this and I bet you that's where the 'missing space' has gone.
Click to expand...

There are folders, such as the System Volume Information folder on the root of your drive, that can't be enumerated until you explicitly give yourself permission to do so. Until then, it will show up as taking up 0 bytes of space, even if all of your 'hidden' data is in one of them.
 
Umm, where do you see that the drive is full? You are not basing it on the small bar in WinDirStat next to the root entry that is at 100%, do you?
That bar just means that the root and all its subtrees contain 100% of the data on the drive - which is always the case. The column is even called subtree percentage.
 
Snowknight26 said:
Doesn't matter, what I wrote in that thread applies here:



There are folders, such as the System Volume Information folder on the root of your drive, that can't be enumerated until you explicitly give yourself permission to do so. Until then, it will show up as taking up 0 bytes of space, even if all of your 'hidden' data is in one of them.
Click to expand...

Alright so what should I do?
 
allen5055 said:
Alright so what should I do?
Click to expand...

The first thing you should do is to tell us where you got the impression that the disk is full.

There are some directories in WinDirStat that are reported as 0 byte, i.e. "Recovery". Please check whether those are really empty.
Please also check under "My Computer->System protection" the size of you system restore points.
 
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omniscence said:
The first thing you should do is to tell us where you got the impression that the disk is full.

There are some directories in WinDirStat that are reported as 0 byte, i.e. "Recovery". Please check whether those are really empty.
Please also check under "My Computer->System protection" the size of you system restore points.
Click to expand...

Windows kept reporting that less than 10% of disk space was available and when I looked at c: it said there was less than 1GB of free space. Then I cleared the recycle bin, ran disk cleanup, and moved titanfall which is why it now says there's 60GB or so free. However, as far as I can tell I only have 40GB of data so there's 100GB of something extra.

I'll check the size of the system restore points, but when I looked at it last I only had one restore point and system restore said it was using less than 1GB. I only have system restore set to use a maximum of 10% of the drive space, and only for the SSD.

Yeah, I'll check the recovery folders.
 
There is also the possibility of there being ALOT of small files that are taking up the minimum sector size.

This picture demonstrates how a bunch of empty files can take up a lot of space simply because the SSD has to commit each file to its own 4 kilobyte sector.

sector_size.jpg
 
That's not going to add up to anywhere close to his unaccounted-for space. Even with 1 million of those, assuming a 4KB allocation unit size, that's only 4GB being taken up.
 
Manually go to C:\Windows\Temp, select all, then do a Shift+Delete and have it delete everything it will let you.

Do the same for C:\Windows\Prefetch

There is also a whole lot of other stuff that Windows Disk Cleanup does not actually clean up.. such as the Windows Update Cache.

1. Stop Windows update service
2. Delete The "C:\windows\softwaredistribution" folder
3. Start Windows update service.

You may also want to manually clear out your browser cache files. Check what the IE cache is set to.

Also, on the Windows Disk Cleanup, did you click "Cleanup System Files"? If not, then you probably have another 3-5GB+ of other files that can be gotten rid of.

Another thing to do to keep useless files away is to disable memory dumps when stuff crashes.

Right click on "Computer", select "Properties", go to "Advanced System Settings", then "Startup and Recovery". Set "Write debugging information" to none.

Then as a last step, download ccleaner and run the cleanup on it.
https://www.piriform.com/CCLEANER
 
None of that will help him figure out where the other data is. Only he can do that now given that we've basically told him.
 
Snowknight26 said:
None of that will help him figure out where the other data is. Only he can do that now given that we've basically told him.
Click to expand...

I am betting a good portion of that is being taken up by the things I said to clean up.

Especially since there was apparently a huge amount that was already cleaned up by other steps.

It sounds to me like the system has pretty much never been cleaned of junk before.

The temp folder itself probably has 2-10GB of Data in it if this is true.

The softwaredistribution folder probably has another 3-8GB in it.

The IE cache could have 2GB+ in it.

The Drive Cleanup, if it has not been run to clean up system files, could have a huge amount in it, especially if there are full memory dumps. I have seen 20-30GB just from that.. and that doesn't even take into account the probably 3-7GB of data that it will get rid of from old Windows Updates.

So yeah, it will help.
 
cyclone3d said:
I am betting a good portion of that is being taken up by the things I said to clean up.
Click to expand...

No, because none of that touches the folders that contain the space not even his user account can access (which is where the problem resides).
 
Problem solved. My parents installed Google drive on the SSD without telling me. I could only see it when they were logged on her account. It was syncing 150GB of data. When I moved Titanfall I had 60GB free at space but when I logged on this morning I was down to 4GB free space, so I knew that something was syncing files.
 
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Hrm - that's weird... there's no reason for you to not see the space usage if you selected all the contents of C: with everything visible..
Were you not logged in as an administrator while doing all this stuff then?
or you didn't actually unhide hidden/system files ?
 
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