SSD is very slowly filling up its free space, and I have exhausted all my options

This is a brand new 1 week old Alienware 15 R4 with dual drives, an SSD boot drive, and a 1TB hard drive for backups and storage.

Using C:\ to refer to the SSD, and the D:\ to refer to the 1TB hard drive, out of the box, I have checked and made sure that my Alienware 15 R4:

• Has no System Restores turned on.
• Has TRIM enabled in Windows 10 OS.
• Has moved all User Folders to the D:\ drive (Documents, Videos, Music, etc.).
• Has changed Profile Path and Home Path to the D:\ on my user account via the Local Users Management service.
• Have remapped the PATHs in the System Environment Variables.

And there were some information I found online that is a bit conflicting:

• Hiberation mode in Windows 10 is turned off via:
  
  Code:

  powercfg -h off

  , but they say Windows 10 knows you are using SSDs, so they have a system in the OS that would automatically turn off the Hiberation mode for SSDs.
• Storage Sense in Windows 10 Creator's Update is turned off. I don't know if I should turn this on, because this is a pretty new feature in Windows 10. And there aren't a ton of information about this for SSDs.
• I have a newer article that mentioned how Windows 10 is built up to support SSDs without any hitches, and this goes against other known SSD overprovisioning articles in the past.
• Moved pagefile to secondary drive. Optionally left maximum of 4GB pagefile on the SSD.

But after doing all of these things, and not touching some of the default settings, I still see my SSD boot drive is slowly creeping up, and take a few 2MB per second of capacity with them. In other words, I'm really slowly losing my SSD boot drive free space capacity.

What else do I need to do to prevent this "creeping" from taking up my SSD?

Thanks.

 

I feel safe in saying there is absolutely nothing that is slowly eating up your drive space other than your own actions, downloads, Windows updates, and so on.


How big is your OS drive.


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I know I’m going to regret asking....but where are you getting this view that “2MB a second are creeping your drive”


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128GB SSD, the smallest SSD you can get in an Alienware 15 R4.

I took into account that Windows Update will slowly decrease its free space, but when there were no updates happening, it would be weird to say it is caused by Windows Update.

The only thing I downloaded and installed on the SSD is Visual Studio 2017. Everything else is installed on the D:\ drive, and I took precautions to set the installation folders to be on the D:\ drive.

There is one thing I have in mind, and that is the use of Microsoft Edge, Known to be a UWP app, I'm thinking it might have been loading temporary internet files onto the C drive without me being able to do anything about it.

Right click on the SSD to bring up the context menu. Then select Properties, to see the full capacity being used in bytes. Every second or 2, I close and reopen the Properties, then try to remember the first 6 digits from the right. It is as close to 1 or 2 MB, at a steady pace, increasing the Used Space and decreasing the Free Space.

 

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Based on your information your system is apparently losing 3.6-7.2GB am hour. In other words your drive would be full in just about half a day. Call me crazy but I doubt that is what is happening. And that certainly isn’t sustainable.

1-2MB/sec = 60-120 MB/mi = 3.6-7.2GB/hr

You didn’t mention what is supposedly using up all that space but again it’s not sustainable and you drive would be totally out of space at this point.

You failed to properly size your OS drive for your usage. As a Windows Server Engineer 100GB is the base size we use for an OS drive. Any additional programs that will be installed on thr OS drive are added to that total and the minimum drive size is increased accordingly.

I can’t imagine buying a tiny 128GB OS drive for a home computer in 2018. That’s simply way too small unless thr ONLY thing you put on it is Windows and out all other programs and user profile directories on the secondary drive.

Anyways the space being used by the OS has minor fluctuations. That is what you are seeing. I have never seen Windows 10 magically suck up that space. The only thing remotely close to that I’ve seen is on windows server with audit logging enabled.


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By the way,

My new 17r5 came from the factory with roughly 50GB used on the OS drive. MS documentation states Visual Studio requires 25-50 GB of free space.

So, on your computer you’ve basically already used up that tiny 128GB drive.


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No, I only had 6GB installed for Visual Studio, and it goes above 13GB if it's split into 2 drives. You cannot move shared components out from the primary drive, due to system components taking up the majority of the shared components required by other software.

So I left it on the primary drive because of the additional file size requirements.

I removed about 40GB worth of stuffs for Visual Studio prior to the installation, as those are the things I do not need.


My SSD still has 44.8GiB left of free space, out of the maximum 108GiB of free space.

 

Stuff like gpu shader cache becomes bigger depending on the amount of games you have installed etc.

 

http://www.uderzo.it/main_products/space_sniffer/download.html

edit: Be sure to run it elevated

 

Well this confirms that there’s no special gremlins eating up free space.




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Thanks, I'll check it out.

 

Try wise disk cleaner and see if that helps in gaining lost space. It might be update caches of both VS 2017 and Win 10.

 

I did a bit of deductive reasoning.

On my workstation, which houses a 512GB SSD, I do not see the SSD slowly losing free space over time. And it's a default clean Windows 10 Pro installation with no configuration changes made whatsoever. Not even the need to muck around with User Folders and such.

On the contrary, this happens on my laptop. And I had to do quite a bit of changes and checking the configurations. But it still happens.

This means, there might be a background service/startup application that's doing all of this. Will post some updates once I figured out what's going on inside a new Alienware 15 R4 laptop.





Update:


Disabling everything on my laptop, including user services (non-System, non-Microsoft services), user startup applications and Alienware applications, I still see the SSD creeping along and losing a bit of free space. But it is an improvement in that it's now every 20 seconds or so, it writes around 1KB of data to the SSD.

And this laptop only has Steam, Windows Defender, Macrium Reflect, Realtek HD Audio, and Alienware On-Screen Display installed as startup apps.

I don't know, I feel like this is it. I'm ending my case and say, screw it, the SSD is going to slowly fill up the free space, and I am going to accept that it's a normal thing. Mucking it around to get to 49.7GB of free space without attempting to go overboard on uninstalling apps is enough as it is.

 

Check your c:\windows\temp folder, delete all that’s in it

 

I right click on c:drive. Then hit clean disk. Then clean system files and then delete. Then I optimize the drives and I gain a lot of wasted space back on SSD.

I do this about 3 times in a row. I just did it and went from 278gb to 294gb

 

One reason for extra space being taken up without any real substance... Volume Shadow Copies. That and anything that makes small backups whenever you go and install or uninstall programs, more and more disc space gets taken up.

 

Try wise disk cleaner and Dism++ to increase your free space to 300GB. Ignore/Don't use Advanced cleaner section in wise disk cleaner rest are good and safe.

 

I don’t like using programs like that because when you install it there is so much bloatware installled along with the program. Aka cc-cleaner

 

Yuuuuup.


And in this case it’s silly to use those on a new Windows install.


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Temp folders were all moved to the HDD already. The only thing left is Microsoft Edge browser's temp folder, which I can't move.

Huh, I will have to look into this and attempt to disable this. I'm already using Macrium Reflect and external drives for backups, so it might be a good idea to attempt to disable Volume Shadow Copies.

 

I have moved my pagefiles to the HDD, and left 4GB of pagefile on the SSD, due to considerable performance recommendations on tech sites I visited. They recommend putting the pagefile on the SSD, but I can set the max size of the pagefile, before letting the System determine how much to manage automatically on the HDD.

So that's another thing worth mentioning. Going to see how much I can push, now that I have 51GB free on my SSD. Technically 46GB free because of the pagefile allocation.

Edit:

Yep, setting the max pagefile size to 4GB reduces the chance Windows will put 14GB of pagefile on the SSD.