It doesn't add up-Strorage capacity

[Guest]

Hi, i have a technical question that by the way will probably be totally noobish but here it goes

I have two storage hard drives on my PC, a samsung ssd and a sata III

On the ssd i have my windows installation and Skyrim

On the sata III i put everything else

Now here's the point of my question, the total amount of data i have stored on my c drive is 79,1GB so i should have about 

31,9 GB of free space in c drive, though i only seem to have 5,87GB.

Whatever i download from the internet is being stored in I drive and also whatever i have placed on my desktop

So, where should i look for 'garbage stuff' that probably occupy most of my supposed rest of free space of the c drive?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sorryif i posted in the wrong place but i couldn't find some place more appropriate.Thanks

[Guest]

Use these two (free) tools @PeterForFun:
 
CCleaner to clean up the trash
JDiskReport to better check where the trash is.

 

[Guest]

Hi CPU, are these tools safe for the health of the ssd?

[Leo77]

Now i'm no expert or nothing, but doesn't your OS take some of the space up?

[Guest]

These tools will not damage the SSD at all.

I use them from time to time when I want to clean up the trash from my drives (both SSDs)

 

But of course they will not check the conditions of the SSD, you need different tools to check the health status of a SSD drive.

 

[Ark of Truth]

Its only recommended to run CCleaner only once on a SSD otherwise you can have problems later on.

[Guest]

Its only recommended to run CCleaner only once on a SSD otherwise you can have problems later on.

 

I use it about once a week on 2 SSD, I did it from the last 2 years for one SSD and for a little bit more than one year for the second.

 

They are both still full functional.

 

Why cleaning up data should harm a SSD?

Reading/Writing too many times?

 

Today SSDs support millions of re-writing on the same block...

[Guest]

Well, i uded CCCleaner and it saved me about 3,5GB of space.There are still more GB that are being occupied by 'stuff'

[BillBellochek]

I agree with the suggestion to use CCleaner, I use it on all my computers and love it. However I'm not a big fan of JDiskReport, I find it clunky. My prefered program is Space Sniffer (here). Space Sniffer shows all data in a live tree graph. So the bigger the box is, the more is stored there. Then you can click on the box to see what folders are taking up the most room, and so on. Plus Space Sniffer is portable and doesn't require an installation. Anyway, if you'd like to be sure of the health of your SSD, I also recommend Crystal Disk (Here). Crystal Disk will tell you the health, temp, current reads/writes, etc. It's a great tool for checking on the life of your SSD, but programs like Space Sniffer and JDiskReport are no harder on your disk than Windows itself. So I wouldn't worry about using them. After all, SSD's can handle a pedobite or more of data transfer before failure.

 

Also a note for you, your SSD will most likely not have a full 110GB (or however large the SSD is) available for use. For example, I have a Corsair Neutron GTX that is 120GB. However I only have 111GB total of available storage (Here's a screenshot of mine to show what I'm talking about). That 14GB of storage that is missing from my drive is still there, it's actually 14GB of backup blocks in case a cell in the drive goes bad, it can use some of that 14GB to replace it. I'm sure your drive does something simmilar.

[Guest]

Use the other tool to find where the space is consumed.

In many cases the files are not cleaned by CCleaner because they are not considered junk.

[BillBellochek]

Well, i uded CCCleaner and it saved me about 3,5GB of space.There are still more GB that are being occupied by 'stuff'

 

You might clean out old System Restore points. If you have a lot you can easily get back 10GB. To do that in CCleaner, you just have to go to Tools>System Restore>Then you can clear out all but the most recent backup (The most recent backup is impossible to remove so you still have a system restore left if you need it)

[Guest]

Another point to understand why a 256Gb drive has only 240Gb space (the consideration from @BillBellochek is true but it varies for different manufacturers) is:

* The commercial capacity of a drive is calculated in 1000 byes for a Kilobyte.

* The capacity calculated by the OS is a power of two, so there are 1024 bytes in a KB.

 

So from the "commercial" capacity you always have about 2.5% less available when you use the drive.

[Guest]

My ssd also is of 120gb too, i am aware of the fact that some of the GB are not supposed to be used , my desktop also shows 111gb intead of 120gb total.That's not a problem, the problem is that 111-79.1=31,9 not 5,87 that have become 9GB after use of cccleaner.There are still 22,9GB left to be discovered

 

Well, i uded CCCleaner and it saved me about 3,5GB of space.There are still more GB that are being occupied by 'stuff'

 

You might clean out old System Restore points. If you have a lot you can easily get back 10GB. To do that in CCleaner, you just have to go to Tools>System Restore>Then you can clear out all but the most recent backup (The most recent backup is impossible to remove so you still have a system restore left if you need it)

 

There seems not to be any erasable

[bjornk]

Windows won't display the "actual" disk usage when you do what you did in the second screenshot. The size of ProgramData folder, for instance, is probably bigger, you need to go into ProgramData\Microsoft\Search etc. (which may require admin permission) and then have the OS recalculate the size, or use a third-party program such as this.

 

You may clean up restore points, temporary files (both in AppData\Local\Temp and Windows\Temp) and Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download etc. However, it's best to run Disk Cleanup first (run as administrator) and let it do its thing and then run CCleaner and clean browser crap, and then see if there's anything left in the above mentioned directories.

[BillBellochek]

Well, then as CPU and I suggested, give one of the disk management tools a try.

[Guest]

 

 

 

 

 

So what should i make of it now?

[BillBellochek]

Another point to understand why a 256Gb drive has only 240Gb space (the consideration from @BillBellochek is true but it varies for different manufacturers) is:

* The commercial capacity of a drive is calculated in 1000 byes for a Kilobyte.

* The capacity calculated by the OS is a power of two, so there are 1024 bytes in a KB.

 

So from the "commercial" capacity you always have about 2.5% less available when you use the drive.

 

Either way, there are 6.19GB of blocks to fall back to instead of 14GB.

[Guest]

Windows won't display the "actual" disk usage when you do what you did in the second screenshot. The size of ProgramData folder, for instance, is probably bigger, you need to go into ProgramData\Microsoft\Search etc. (which may require admin permission) and then have the OS recalculate the size, or use a third-party program such as this.

 

You may clean up restore points, temporary files (both in AppData\Local\Temp and Windows\Temp) and Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download etc. However, it's best to run Disk Cleanup first (run as administrator) and let it do its thing and then run CCleaner and clean browser crap, and then see if there's anything left in the above mentioned directories.

Where is this 'disk cleanup' utlilty?Is it a windows function?

[bjornk]

It's a Windows utility. Go to Start then type Disk Cleanup, it'll show up (if Windows Search isn't disabled), then right-click on it and choose run as admin.

 

This might help...

http://www.howtogeek.com/125923/7-ways-to-free-up-hard-disk-space-on-windows/

 

You really shouldn't use more than 80% of the total capacity of an SSD.

[Guest]

Your "Games" directory contains 35.6 Gb

Windows is using 24Gb

"Users" as 7.1Gb (probably files on your desktop, pictures, documents, etc.)

The other folders are very small in size and I will not lose time on them.

 

But you have 27.8Gb in your root C: drive. For sure there is the page file that is consuming space. But double check what is in the root folder.

 

Edit: Keep in mind that the PageFile.sys is NOT visible in normal circumstances. And it consumes about the double of your installed memory.

 

[BillBellochek]

It's a Windows utility. Go to Start then type Disk Cleanup, it'll show up, then right-click on it and choose run as admin.

 

You really shouldn't use more than 80% of the total capacity of an SSD.

 

What? Where you pulling that out of? Unlike HDD's, SSD's don't slow down as they fill up. So there's no benefit to keeping a buffer of free space on the SSD, in terms of performance.

 

[Guest]

Your "Games" directory contains 35.6 Gb

Windows is using 24Gb

"Users" as 7.1Gb (probably files on your desktop, pictures, documents, etc.)

The other folders are very small in size and I will not lose time on them.

 

But you have 27.8Gb in your root C: drive. For sure there is the page file that is consuming space. But double check what is in the root folder.

 

Edit: Keep in mind that the PageFile.sys is NOT visible in normal circumstances. And it consumes about the double of your installed memory.

 

 

 

 

How do i access that?The other areas are clickable.The grey one is not

 

Also Disk cleanup didn't find anything probably because i runned ccleaner first

[BillBellochek]

Your "Games" directory contains 35.6 Gb

Windows is using 24Gb

"Users" as 7.1Gb (probably files on your desktop, pictures, documents, etc.)

The other folders are very small in size and I will not lose time on them.

 

But you have 27.8Gb in your root C: drive. For sure there is the page file that is consuming space. But double check what is in the root folder.

 

Edit: Keep in mind that the PageFile.sys is NOT visible in normal circumstances. And it consumes about the double of your installed memory.

 

The pagefile is not the only large file stored in the root. Don't forget about the Hibernate file. Mine is larger than my pagefile, since I dropped the size of my page file to 4GB.

[Guest]

To @PeterForFun, you can do a right click on the area (the gray one you highlighted) and do "Open Folder". It is the root directory you can go there in any way you want.

To @BillBellochek, you are right. I just don't use the hibernate feature, so I do not have this file. And my pagefile is 32Gb...

 

[bjornk]

 

It's a Windows utility. Go to Start then type Disk Cleanup, it'll show up, then right-click on it and choose run as admin.

 

You really shouldn't use more than 80% of the total capacity of an SSD.

 

What? Where you pulling that out of? Unlike HDD's, SSD's don't slow down as they fill up. So there's no benefit to keeping a buffer of free space on the SSD, in terms of performance.

 

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6489/playing-with-op

http://www.howtogeek.com/165472/6-things-you-shouldnt-do-with-solid-state-drives/

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2110095/the-ultimate-guide-to-proper-ssd-management.html