Another IT question - SSD drive fillin up for no reason

[Digsy]

I remember when I was good at this computer lark...

 

I have an SSD as my Windows 7 system drive. Recently it has been filling up t almost full capacity. Recently I did a bit more digging and found that out of all the files I can actually see (this is with "view hidden files" turned ON and "hide system files" turned OFF) only accounts for about half of the disk usage as reported by Windows explorer. Note that this includes the pagefile.sys which weighs in at 8Gb.

 

From Googling, this seems to be a common issue and the usual fixes are:

 

Turn off hibernation and delete hiberfil.sys - DONE

Turn off indexing on the C: drive and rebuild the index - DONE

Turn off System Restore - DONE

Run disc cleanup to remove temporary and other files not required. - DONE

Empty the recycle bin - DONE

Run checkdisk - DONE

 

So far this has only freed up a couple of Gb so I am starting to think that something is up with the file system on the SSD. I only have two accounts on the machine: One for my day to day use and another admin account which has no files at all in user areas. In fact I don't store files at all on my C: drive. It is all Windows and Programme files.

 

The only thing I have not tried in anger is to power up the machine without the SATA cable connected, which is supposed to allow the SSD to do its "garbage collection"/ I have also changed the hard drive settings in power management so that the hard drive never powers off. This is supposed to do a similar thng by letting the drive remain "live" while the rest of the PC sleeps, which should give it time to do its garbage collection overnight.

 

Apart from the above, has anyone got any ideas?

[cheekymonkey]

Give https://windirstat.info a try. It's not SSD specific but it's really good at highlighting areas of unexpected high usage.

[Wez]

Might be worth checking if TRIM is enabled and running, some older SSD drive controllers had TRIM issues under windows.

 

 

Give https://windirstat.info a try. It's not SSD specific but it's really good at highlighting areas of unexpected high usage.

 

I use this too

[cheekymonkey]

I did wonder about TRIM but even if it wasn't enabled it shouldn't cause this sort of file system usage issue. Free space is maintained and reported by NTFS or whatever not the SSD which is why I suspect this is not an SSD issue per se.

[Digsy]

Goddammit. How annoying / embarrassing...

 

I used WinDirStat and it immediately identified 41.5Gb of data in my Windows/temp folder. Thing is, these files were not showing up in the size reported for the Windows parent folder, so I missed them. Also, they do not get deleted when you use Disk Cleanup to delete temp files. Grrrrr...!

 

I assume it is safe to delete everything in Windows/temp?

[cheekymonkey]

Awesome

 

Yeah you should be safe to delete everything in there.

[Digsy]

Going a bit deeper it seems I have a problem similar to the one described here:

 

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-files/cabxxxx-files-found-in-windowstemp-folder/2e86137e-7e6b-4cb7-9a3c-4ee73f665742?auth=1

 

It looks like once or twice a day my machine puts a cab_XXXX file into Windows/temp which is exactly 128,511kb in size, and has been doing so since 10th March this year. I can't te this down to a specific software install so I will follow the instructions on that website and see if the problem goes away.

 

Edit: More info here: http://consek-blog.azurewebsites.net/cab_-files-eating-space/

Seems like it might be caused by not restarting the PC for an extended period, which fits as my PC is normally left on 27/4.

[Digsy]

Seems to be fixed. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this thread.