SSd wasted space

W

Wolvie56X

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 3, 2010
Messages
159
i bought an Intel X25 80gb drive, have my main OS on there, Win7, which takes up 11GB, i had Steam on there as well and a few games, but i moved my Steam folder over to a different drive and uninstalled it, then reinstalled it to the other drive, games worked great

somewhere, 13gb is being used somewhere, total space being used by the SSD is 24.4, my programs folder is showing 1gb used space

so i guess what im asking is, where did all the space go and how does TRIM work?

should i try to free up that used space or what?

24.4 gb used, 49.9 free space with only 12gb accounted for
 
24.4 + 49.9 = 74.3GiB that's about right with an 80GB device.

What exactly is you question?
 
Oh i guess you mean of the 24.4GiB used you only can 'see' 13GiB. Well, it may be System Restore; google on that and you'll find how to reduce the footprint of System Restore. I do recommend to leave it enabled, if possible.
 
im running the data integrity and it seems to be messing with the free space, went from 49 to 23 right now, so maybe its deleting or over writing previously used sectors, its taking a long time, so i think its doing its job, will update in a few
 
ok, it finished and its back to 49,9 free, 24.4 used

this is annoying, missing 12gb

it would be possible that 11gb OS would need an 11gb OS system restore... maybe
 
from what i just read, if you have pagefile enabled, that usually takes up 1.5 times the amount of RAM you have installed, i have 8gb RAM, so thats 12gb, gonna disable pagefile and see what happens

i ran treesize and its only showing 13gb used space on the SSD, so the missing 12gb could be the windows page file
 
If you have 4+ GB of RAM and don't consistently use all of it, make your pagefile 32MB. If you don't Hibernate, just google how to disable hibernation.
 
Ya, I wondered same thing. Disabled pagefile noticd fraction of second differences re-enabled it but 400mb min 1gb max, and everything zoom zoom. I have 6gb ram, might ad another 6gb too... zoom zoom :D

I still need to disable hibernate.
 
type in CMD in your search feature in the start menu, when cmd prompt pops up, right click and run as administrator then copy and paste this line in: powercfg /hibernate off

then hit enter
 
got it

if anyone else is wondering, just type in pagefile into the windows 7 search area in the start menu and it gives you step by step directions in changing the pagefile size

i went from 8.2gb down to 500mb min and 4gb max

see how this does, might even reduce it more, but the SSD is size up more to my liking, 8gb felt like a waste on such a small drive, 80gb size
 
Wolvie56X said:
got it

if anyone else is wondering, just type in pagefile into the windows 7 search area in the start menu and it gives you step by step directions in changing the pagefile size

i went from 8.2gb down to 500mb min and 4gb max

see how this does, might even reduce it more, but the SSD is size up more to my liking, 8gb felt like a waste on such a small drive, 80gb size
Click to expand...

I went with a 3GB min, 3GB max (so a static 3GB) pagefile on the SSD. That should provide enough address space (along with my 6GB of RAM) for even memory hogging programs to allocate. If not, I made a system-managed pagefile on my 500GB HDD as a back up.

And kill that hiberate already!
 
GreenMonkey said:
I went with a 3GB min, 3GB max (so a static 3GB) pagefile on the SSD. That should provide enough address space (along with my 6GB of RAM) for even memory hogging programs to allocate. If not, I made a system-managed pagefile on my 500GB HDD as a back up.

And kill that hiberate already!
Click to expand...

I did something similar on my second hard drive and am wondering how windows allocates pagefile for primary, and secondary... is it based on the drive your using or will it just start using hte 2nd drive whenever it needs it ?
 
Since virtually all Windows apps (even games) are 32-bit; you're limited to 2GiB per application. With 4GB+ memory that means a single application cannot 'hog' your swap space. Even better, without any swap at all no program can 'hog' your computer and slow things down. As soon as it requests too much memory (and it has to be 64-bit native binary to do that) it will be killed by the OS because of "out of memory".

With enough memory, your pagefiles are never read or written to; unless an app explicitly request this (Photoshop i heard).
 
sub.mesa said:
Since virtually all Windows apps (even games) are 32-bit; you're limited to 2GiB per application. With 4GB+ memory that means a single application cannot 'hog' your swap space. Even better, without any swap at all no program can 'hog' your computer and slow things down. As soon as it requests too much memory (and it has to be 64-bit native binary to do that) it will be killed by the OS because of "out of memory".

With enough memory, your pagefiles are never read or written to; unless an app explicitly request this (Photoshop i heard).
Click to expand...

Again this comes up, ARGH. It sounds like you are saying to disable the pagefile.

Microsoft themselves, and professional Windows magazines, and other reputable sources, say NOT to disable the pagefile. At Paul Thurrot's Windows super site it is in the Windows myths. I swear I'm going to mark my 5 or 6 pages of evidence that show why you don't disable it.

Here's a quick description that is probably better than mine:

http://home.comcast.net/~SupportCD/XPMyths.html See "Disabling the Paging File improves performance" along with citations from Windows IT Pro magazine and MS themselves.

It's like disabling the L3 cache on your processor because it's "slower" than L1 cache. It's faulty logic.

And sites / forums / etc that have ignored the logic, and Microsoft's advice, and have done tests have showed NO performance gain from removing the pagefile.

Applications need to allocate a lot of memory space to run, even if they are not actively using it; if you've done some programming you should understand how this works with basic variables and such. The pagefile allows them to allocate the space if needed...when the space is going to be actively used, it will be swapped to RAM as it is available for performance.

And lastly, there is no more disk thrashing on an SSD anyway. MS recommends putting the pagefile on the SSD because it's so awesomely fast; the great random read/write speeds makes it great paging device.
 
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GreenMonkey: disabling the pagefile does not disable Virtual Memory design.

I also didn't say that disabling the pagefile would lead to higher performance. After all; if the pagefile is not used it cannot slow down your system; but it does waste space on an SSD and that was my point. You don't need something you don't use; just like the hibernation file.

Toms Hardware has a nice article about disabling the swap completely, and no matter how hard they pushed the system with heavy apps like photoshop/premiere; with enough memory you're fine. It won't run faster; but it will also not run slower. It will just... run. Without pagefile.

The only reason not to disable the pagefile completely would be that error crash reports are stored in there; don't know the details. But you may want to set it at 32MB or so.

Either case, if the pagefile is actually used on a modern system; it would bring that system down to a Pentium 1-class performance machine. Swapping is an emergency solution for systems with too few RAM to run normally.

Since no 32-bit app can address more than 2GiB (unless specially compiled; off-topic) you'll be fine with 4GB+ RAM to disable the swap/pagefile completely or reduce it to 32MB.

Reading your post makes me believe the computer will explode if you do that.
 
There is no improvement, I'll repeat, NO IMPROVEMENT, to be gained by disabling the pagefile. Like I said, it's like disabling the L3 cache because it's "slower" than L2 cache. Or how about disabling the system RAM...after all, it's slower than the cache memory!! It's nonsense; it doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

If there's no gain, and some risk, and MS and most professional sites recommend against it, why do it? The page file will not slow you down. It's an extra resource that is available if needed. There is no reason to disable it, except on a system that is VERY tight on disk space (like a netbook with a 6GB SSD or something like that). If you have so much RAM that you don't need it, it won't get used much. It's not slowing anything down simply by existing.

It's like the Black Viper "tweaks". When tested over at anandtech forums they did...either nothing...or actually made the system SLOWER. This is another one of those tweaks that either does nothing, or actually hurts performance in some circumstances.

The SSD makes for the perfect pagefile, as you'll see Microsoft recommends putting the pagefile on an SSD. It might not be as fast as RAM, but it's a nice pool that is available if needed, and a lot faster than a physical HDD.
 
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The improvement would be not wasting ~10GB on your precious SSD.

A swapfile that isn't used, is wasted space on your SSD. As modern systems do not swap anymore, and generally run 32-bit apps preventing out-of-memory situations anyway, it's perfectly safe to disable the pagefile or lower it to 32MB. Tom's Hardware also put up an article about that and the implications on running large and memory-hungry applications like Premiere and Photoshop. As long as you have a decent amount of RAM (4GB+) you're fine.

I didn't make any claims disabling the pagefile would make the PC go faster - as it is not used it will not affect performance in any way.

The idea of swap is an emergency solution and very ugly in design. So just out of principle you can disable it.

And FYI, I've been running my 5 Ubuntu workstations and FreeBSD server without swap for multiple years.
 
Every worthwhile benchmark I have seen showed that in 4GB+ of RAM situations, lowering the pagefile to 32MB was the ideal setup.
 
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