The Ninja 6.4 GB

T

Tarrosion

Weaksauce
Joined
Oct 2, 2007
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Why are these gigabytes ninja? Because they're invisible.

I recently (2 days ago) received a Lenovo T400 laptop and an Intel 34nm 80GB SSD. I installed the solid state drive, did a clean install of Vista (Home Premium x64) and installed most of the system drivers, including all the critical ones. As I was installing these drivers and doing frequent restarts, I noticed that the hard drive free spaced seemed to be dropping rapidly. For example, I'd download a 10mb self-extracting file for a modem driver, unzip and install it, and after restart the hard drive would have hundreds of megabytes less free space.

Anyways, after I finished installing drivers, I looked around for potential causes of the lost space. Deleting all but the most recent system restore points saved a little bit, but because the system is so new, the gains were not substantial. So I downloaded TreeSize and took a look at the C drive. Including hidden files and system files, 26.6 gigabytes are used (both the pagefile and the hiberfil are above 3GB; is this normal/necessary?). However, right clicking on the drive in my computer shows 33 GB used. Thus, where are the extra 6.4 GB?

Thanks for your help,
Tarrosion

PS. I've heard some disk options, such as superfetch, should be disabled for SSDs. What, if anything, should be changed from the default settings?

PPS. I chose the T400 based on forum members' recommendations. So far, it's been a fantastic machine. Thanks, [H]ard members, for the excellent advice.
 
Hiberfil, pagefile, system restore, Recycle bin can chew up space, but it seems that you covered those already. Hiberfil will be equal to the amount of installed ram and pagefile if left up to the system can be a little under or about 1.5x the amount of installed ram. I think you missed something. I was going to suggest slack space from tiny files but I can't imagine that you would have so many files that are less than 1K in size that could total 6.4GB in space.
 
WinDirStat is an excellent app for indexing your harddrive and seeing where all the space is going.

Superfetch should be just as godo for SSDs as magnetic HDDs, the service preloads and maintains some bits of programs (dlls and such) in RAM so the system has to hit the drive less. Not only that, Superfetch is a function that reads from HDD to RAM, not so much if any writing to disc. Whoever told you it's bad for SSDs is likely very confused.

The "potential" issue with SSD's, and all Flash media, is you can only write to a location so many times. Usually in the 1000's of times these days, and there are some pretty fancy algorithms employed in the firmware of the drives to randomly spread the writes all over the place as fragmentation isn't much of a concern for SSDs. Some people still like to move their Pagefile off and onto a mechanical drive due to how often it's written to, but that's not going to happen for a laptop, so I'd advise to just not worry about it at all.
 
You're all wrong. So very, very wrong.

Open disk management, and you may or may not see those 6.4GB. You probably won't.
It's taken up by the hidden system utilities and restore partition, which absolutely cannot be deleted under any circumstances. Not only will it not allow you to delete it, should you delete it, system recovery and utility CDs as well as certain system utilities will cease to work.
 
That's why you use a clean copy of Windows and not an OEM one. No restore partition to worry about.

But, if it is a PARTITION it won't show up as part of the used C: drive space.
 
AreEss said:
You're all wrong. So very, very wrong.

Open disk management, and you may or may not see those 6.4GB. You probably won't.
It's taken up by the hidden system utilities and restore partition, which absolutely cannot be deleted under any circumstances. Not only will it not allow you to delete it, should you delete it, system recovery and utility CDs as well as certain system utilities will cease to work.
Click to expand...

I installed the solid state drive, did a clean install of Vista (Home Premium x64) and installed most of the system drivers, including all the critical ones. As I was installing these drivers and doing frequent restarts, I noticed that the hard drive free spaced seemed to be dropping rapidly.
Click to expand...

OP does not describe what you claim.
 
Menelmarar said:
OP does not describe what you claim.
Click to expand...
Agreed. A hidden partition has nothing to do with Windows calculating space on a Volume. If Tarrosion (OP) said he looked in Disk Manager and wondered where those 6.4GB went, then I could see AreEss's point but then Tarrosion would be asked to step away from the computer because the answer would have been sooo simple. :D
 
Okay, I missed that this wasn't the Lenovo drive. (BTW, you will have to switch back for warranty service. They have cracked down on that hard.)

Did you install the Lenovo utilities and drivers? A number of them hide files and directories VERY well.
 
I have installed Lenovo drivers and utilities for hardware and the like (such as power management and switchable graphics drivers). I haven't installed stuff like recovery tools.

About the warranty: Apparently Lenovo considers the hard drive a "customer replaceable unit." I spoke to a Lenovo employee (and have proof of this conversation, should it be necessary) who assured me that changing the hard drive will not void the warranty.

I didn't think the drive would come with a random partition taking up 6.4GB of space, but I checked just to make sure, and that wasn't it either.

The recycle bin is empty as well.

The space isn't a huge issue though. When Windows 7 comes out, I'll be doing a clean install to upgrade to that.

Thanks,
Tarrosion
 
Most don't have (legal) access to the RTM, even here. You need technet (or bizspark) or MSDN access to get it.
 
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