Small SSD running OS running into space issues?

T

TheMadHatterXxX

2[H]4U
Joined
Sep 7, 2004
Messages
3,021
Hey guys, I ran into a slight issue over the weekend-I was left with only 2 Gb free space and I needed to figure out why and a fix to solve the issue. Perhaps this may help some of you also.

My 1st gen Intel SSD 80 Gb which i was dedicating to only OS install (Windows 7) and MS Office was running out of space quickly. I was wondering what was taking up all the space!

First thing you can do is download this small app called WinDirStat. This will allow you to view the drive contents and sort by size in the following ways:

http://windirstat.info/


  • [1]The directory list, which resembles the tree view of the Windows Explorer but is sorted by file/subtree size,
    [2]The treemap, which shows the whole contents of the directory tree straight away,
    [3]The extension list, which serves as a legend and shows statistics about the file types.

Disable Hibernation on Windows 7

Windows has two power management modes that you can choose from: one is Sleep Mode, which keeps the PC running in a low power state so you can almost instantly get back to what you were working on. The other is Hibernate mode, which completely writes the memory out to the hard drive, and then powers the PC down entirely, so you can even take the battery out, put it back in, start back up, and be right back where you were.

Hibernate mode uses the hiberfil.sys file to store the the current state (memory) of the PC, and since it’s managed by Windows, you can’t delete the file manually.

Instead, open a command prompt session as admin (right click from Start -> All Programs -> Accessories, select Run As Administrator), then at the command prompt, type “powercfg.exe -h off”. This will delete the hiberfil.sys as well as turning off Hibernate mode.

This removed about 12 Gb of space from my SSD!

Disable pagefile on your SSD on Windows 7 and enable it on another hard drive:

If you have a secondary hard drive with free space, you can move the pagefile and have it run from that drive instead:

Go To:
  • Control Panel -> System
  • Advanced System Settings
  • Advanced Tab
  • Settings button under Performance
  • Advanced Tab
  • Change button under Virtual Memory
  • On your SSD drive, change the option to "No Paging File".
  • Click Set.
  • On your Hard Drive, set the option to either Custom Size or System Managed Size.
  • Click Set.
  • OK and reboot.

This removed another 20 Gb from my SSD!

Move C:\users from your SSD on Windows 7 and enable it on another hard drive:

This will make a symbolic link from C:\Users to X:\Users...it may take a while to robocopy everything from your users folder to another drive.

  1. Enable built in admin account, open cmd.exe (run as admin) and type -
    net user administrator /active:yes
  2. shutdown /r /f /t 00
  3. After restart, press F8 to perform steps 3-9 in safe mode.
  4. login to Administrator and open cmd.exe (run as admin) and type -
  5. robocopy /copyall /mir /xj "C:\Users\Public" "X:\Users\Public"
  6. robocopy /copyall /mir /xj "C:\Users\User" "X:\Users\User" <- *User is your accountname
  7. rmdir /S /Q "C:\Users\Public"
  8. rmdir /S /Q "C:\Users\User" <- *User is your accountname
  9. mklink /J "C:\Users\Public" "X:\Users\Public"
  10. mklink /J "C:\Users\User" "X:\Users\User" <- *User is your accountname
  11. shutdown /r /f /t 00
  12. After restart, login back in to administrator
  13. Under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
  14. Find a key similar to this, "S-1-5-21-4288074848-3222386265-3783365272-1000", that has your User name and change the C to X. <- X is the letter of drive you moved everything to from above.
  15. Disable built in admin account, open cmd.exe (run as admin) and type -
    net user administrator /active:no
  16. shutdown /r /f /t 00
  17. After restart, login to your account and verify everything is working.

This removed about 10 Gb of stuff from my SSD to another drive!


Hope this helps some of you guys... I saved 42 Gb from my SSD by doing this!
 
Last edited:
I would keep the pagefile on the SSD, you want your pagefile to be as fast as possible. You should instead set your pagefile to a static size like 4GB.

On the other hand, if you have more than 8GB of RAM you can usually disable the pagefile with no ill-effects.
 
Last edited:
I would also go into Disk Cleanup. An option to never forget about is cleaning saved/cached windows updates. These can add up to gigabytes eaten up on a fresh clean and updated Win7 install.

Another less invasive "scary" option to reroute your /users shortcuts than using the command line, on a new W7 install...is to just right click on each of the shortcuts in the file explorer and change the target to another drive/folder.
 
It kinda defeats the purpose of the SSD to move virtually everything off of it.
 
leeleatherwood said:
I would keep the pagefile on the SSD, you want your pagefile to be as fast as possible. You should instead set your pagefile to a static size like 4GB.

On the other hand, if you have more than 8GB of RAM you can usually disable the pagefile with no ill-effects.
Click to expand...

Yeah. I would not move your page file from the ssd.
 
staticlag said:
It kinda defeats the purpose of the SSD to move virtually everything off of it.
Click to expand...

Depends on how big an SSD you have, and what all you load onto the system.

80GB unformatted is awful tight for an SSD for a Win system disk. On a 120GB you can usually comfortably most common professional tools (Adobe CS Master, Office), then put Steam, your documents, and AdobeCS scratch space on an HDD. And it works and runs quite well. Otherwise, if you insist on throwing everything on an SSD and have a large Steam directory...you're going to be throwing tons of money at the problem to questionable benefit.
 
nVidia also likes to eat up hard drive space on the OS drive. nVidia keeps backs up of EVERY driver update you install in "C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\Installer2".
 
Keep the pagefile on the SSD, because SSDs excel at pagefile behavior, but since everyone has 4GB or more of RAM these days, you can keep it small, 1GB or less; go small enough and Windows will tell you it needs a minimum for memory dumps, and I just use that amount.

If you're running Win7, you particularly want to go back and run Disk Cleanup again, because an update just a week or two ago clears out several GB of post-SP2 update data from the Windows\WinSXS folder. Don't try to clear that folder out manually, though, because some of it needs to be there.

You can remove everything in the Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download folder. That folder can be quite large if you've never cleared it out, and nothing seems to do that.

If you use Internet Explorer, there may be some Content.IE5 folders scattered around and hidden in places too inconvenient to list here; you'll need to enable seeing hidden system files to search for them. They are often large and full of internet cache files that you can delete and nothing seems to ever clear them out.

After all that, run CCleaner, which is very good at clearing out a bunch of stuff but doesn't touch the above (probably for very good reasons).
 
Just an FYI, I set my page file to 1024MB, but i'm careful not to be one of those 400 tab people in chrome, etc. I also run 16/24/64gb of ram in my various computers.

Also, you can generally right click on the "Libraries" in C:\Users, for example if you're using the "admin" user, your music library in C:\Users\Admin\My Music, and then in properties there is a "Move" command that the system will move libraries for you, including my docs, my music, my videos, etc.
 
TheMadHatterXxX said:
Instead, open a command prompt session as admin (right click from Start -> All Programs -> Accessories, select Run As Administrator), then at the command prompt, type &#8220;powercfg.exe -h off&#8221;. This will delete the hiberfil.sys as well as turning off Hibernate mode.
Click to expand...

This tip was great, thanks as I use sleep not hibernate. I gotta check my windows 8 machine, but I bet you can't do that there, don't they use a hybrid hibernate to boot? cheaters..
 
Entilza said:
This tip was great, thanks as I use sleep not hibernate. I gotta check my windows 8 machine, but I bet you can't do that there, don't they use a hybrid hibernate to boot? cheaters..
Click to expand...

Win8 does require hibernation to be on for "fast startup" (Hybrid Boot). The process to turn off hibernation is still pretty much the same, though: Go to the desktop, press the "Windows Key" + "X" on your keyboard, click the "Command Prompt (Admin)" option, type powercfg -h off.

You just won't get to use Hybrid Boot, which only hibernates system files instead of all files in RAM. You can disable Hybrid Boot.

(Disclaimer: this info is for Windows 8; I don't know if it's changed for Windows 8.1.)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top