more space after blue screen of death

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whitegarden

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i have a 64gb SSD that my OS is installed on. even though i installed every possible program and kept every file on a secondary drive, it seemed to keep filling up on its own. disk cleanups and defrags only seemed to delay the inevitable. while it was at a little over 1GB of free space, i randomly got a blue screen of death while watching a youtube video. afterwards though, i checked my drive and now it has 9GB of free space. what could have caused this? is it giving false information, what may have been deleted?
 
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in this case: i think you need to update the firmware in the SSD, if you are using a current version of windows with proper SSD support the OS will run a trim command to tell the SSD that it is ok to really delete a file that the OS has deleted. SSD drives track all the locations of a file and so does windows. Basically, you delete a file, it goes to the recycle bin, when you empty the recycle bin the file is deleted as far as the OS is concerned but the SSD does not know it until the trim command is called from the OS. Now, some SSD have firmware issues where they are too busy to actually call and execute their trim functions and mark their internal allocations for the files as being free. The SSD will continue to use new...
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johnbl

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in this case: i think you need to update the firmware in the SSD, if you are using a current version of windows with proper SSD support the OS will run a trim command to tell the SSD that it is ok to really delete a file that the OS has deleted. SSD drives track all the locations of a file and so does windows. Basically, you delete a file, it goes to the recycle bin, when you empty the recycle bin the file is deleted as far as the OS is concerned but the SSD does not know it until the trim command is called from the OS. Now, some SSD have firmware issues where they are too busy to actually call and execute their trim functions and mark their internal allocations for the files as being free. The SSD will continue to use new blocks until they
run out (but the SSD has a large amount of pending blocks to free up) when you reboot, the system does a reset and the SSD has free time before the OS is loaded to actually process its pending free list and when you boot into windows you all of a sudden have free space.

The Workaround for this is often to boot into BIOS so your SSD has power but no demands on it, the SSD will detect the idle condition after about 5 mins and start running its garbage collection routines.

another solution is updates to SSD firmware, or to use a SSD aware OS like windows 8. Sometimes it is cause because of the interface to the SSD that you are using. There are other causes but that is what I can think of right now.

you can clean up your drive and recover a bunch of space ( then boot into BIOS to allow the cleanup in the SSD)
start by running the built in utility
cleanmgr.exe

lost of hidden files on your machine even if you don't install your main programs on the default drive.
- delete some of the old restore points
- disable JAVA cahce
- disable Macromedia storage and prefetch of websites
- use the dism.exe command to remove old windows updates and service packs backups
- reduce page file size
- remove hibernate files
- if you use chrome, you want to delete your cache files.
- remove programs you don't want
- you might even want to create another account with admin right, log on to that account and delete your old one
(lots of the hidden files are just junk left under your account name on the disk, my wife's account has 26GB of junk under her account name, old temp files, programs she uninstalled, log files, cache files for various programs she does not even use.)
 
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whitegarden

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umm...booting to the bios and waiting a few minutes worked, but whenever i don't boot to the bios and start the computer normally, the drive says it has 1GB free space again, which also fluctuates between 500MB and 2GB randomly.

i tried to update the firmware of the SSD but it said it was up to date. it's a Crucial M4.
 
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johnbl

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if you are using a legacy OS like windows 7, you might have to call the trim commands using a utility provided by the manufacture.
you can check if trim is enabled:
start cmd.exe as a administrator
fsutil.exe behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

if the result is 0 then TRIM is enabled.
or you can check a registry key but you have to google for the key because I don't remember it. (it was some memory management key)

windows 8.x will TRIM SSD automatically when it does its maintenance or when you attempt to defrag a SSD drive.

Older versions you had to do it yourself with a program.

if you are getting a lot of disk IO from cache files, you might want to move them
to another drive. on my old system I created a RAM drive and put the google internet cache files on them. I configured the RAM drive to swap to disk before i shutdown and reload from disk at startup. But back then I was worried about too many writes to my SSD and early death. I don't worry about it now.

 
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whitegarden

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i got 0, so trim is enabled. i think the problem had to do with the page file for some reason. i took it off auto and set it to a constant 600mb. now whenever i start the computer up it doesn't regress to the 1GB of space (though it still fluctuates a few MBs here and there)
 
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johnbl

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Pagefile cause a special type of hell for SSD, the TRIM commands are only called after the entire file is deleted. It is a special case for most people they never delete the pagefile so the SSD has to do a garbage collection routine, and a ware block balancing. A SSD drive memory block is not like RAM it is a special type of memory that can only be written to about 2k to 3k times then the block will fail and have the last written contents burned in. When this happens the SSD firmware has to copy the info to a new working block and move it back under where the file is located and the page file will work as expected. it also marks the block as bad and reduces size of the available SSD drive. most of them reserve some space for this but they will run out of the reserve and your SSD will start to shrink in size as the blocks get used.

you get the same issue when people use a program to install the OS as one big file on a SSD, as far as the OS is concerned you have thousands of files and it calls the trim functions all the time. As far as the SSD is concerned, you only have one very large file and it will not actually run its functions until the entire file is marked free.
(will not happen until you format the drive again)




 
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johnbl

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no, you can still disable the pagefile, reboot the OS and windows will make a small pagefile in memory. then you can delete the one on your hard drive, reboot and configure the os to make another one on the disk.

the other problem only occurs when you make a windows image onto a SSD rather than using the windows setup program. Some IT people do this to set up machines and a month later the SSD seems to fail because of it. Newer versions of these image program should not have that issue.



 
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