Don't know why storage space is being taken up

[Silverspear]

I have a 128gb SSD which, at the moment, only has my OS and one driver on it. However, when I go to my "computer" folder it says that 77GB are being taken up. Now I went through each one of the folders on the SSD, they added up to only 17GB. What is taking up those 60GB of storage space. I have already tried cleaning it up, defraging it and checking it for errors. But there are still those 60GB being taken up. Is my only option reformating it and starting from scratch again or are there other options. Any advice you guys could give would be great!

 

[jcoultas98]

Try this:

http://www.xdude.com/ssd-hard-drive-windows-7-winsxs

 

[aylafan]

Turn off "System Restore" and see how much space you get back. Did you format the SSD before installing the OS?

 

[ahnilated]

You have system restore, hibernation, swap file all taking up space. You can disable them all if you like but it can cause other issues.

Check this out: http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/6-ways-to-free-disk-space-in-windows-7/

 

[cin19]

Don't do the SSD defragmentation. It will hurt the performance.

You should follow the useful SSD Articles part2---Tweaks / Optimization SSD
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/270102-32-useful-articles-part

 

[Silverspear]

Well I tried turning off system restore and that only got rid of only less than a gig. One thing that I failed to mention was that I originally put Win 7 on my build, and then I installed Win 8 preview. But Win 8 was giving my computer problems so I went back to Win 7. Now I realize that the previous Windows installations create "Windows-old" folder and I have already deleted them through disk cleanup. Could there be any other hidden files that are taking up space?

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

Open the Start Menu, in the search line, type CMD
Right click CMD icon that comes up and choose "Run as administrator"
Type powercfg -h off and press enter

 

[Silverspear]

still hasn't changed

 

[nukemaster]

You may be able to track what is taking all the space with this.

For my the biggest files was always page file + hibernate.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/windirstat/files/windirstat/1.1.2%20installer%20re-release%20%28more%20languages!%29/windirstat1_1_2_setup.exe/download

 

[Silverspear]

Best answer selected by Silverspear.

 

[Silverspear]

Thanks nukemaster! Sorry it took me so long to respon, but I ran the software and I found out it was my pagefile.sys that was taking up so much space. This file apparently is used in case your memory overflows and therefore the size was based off how much memory I had (32GB). And after doing some research, I found out that I can move this file to a different hard drive. Therefore, I'm just going to move it to my 1TB HDD to open up space in my SSD. Thanks everyone for taking the time to respond! I really appreciate it!

 

[nukemaster]

I just reduced mine to 4 gigabytes and left it on the SSD, but my storage drives are all 5900rpm with real bad access times.

Did you by any chance find a chunk of space taken by hiberfil.sys. If you did and do not use hibernate, I would remove it.

powercfg -h off in the command prompt