The Incredible Shrinking Hard Drive

[$5DAW 10]

My Incredible Shrinking Hard Drive (but no more)

 

Recently I built a new trading computer and installed a 64GB solid state hard drive as a system drive.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148357

 

Since my previous computer had a 70GB drive and I only used 9GB total over the period of almost seven years I felt confident the 64GB drive would satisfy my needs. As I said, this is a trading computer, I don't store movies, pictures, watch videos or play games on it, just trading related software and a few accounting programs. I upgraded (you decide) from XP pro (32) to Win 7 pro (64) and installed the maximum 16 GB of RAM my motherboard allowed.

 

After the fresh installation of Win 7 pro I noticed it (win 7) took up 43.2 GB of my 64 GB SSD I went ahead and loaded all my other programs and got things working quite well, in fact the new box exceeds my expectations and I'm very pleased. Except for that HUGE amount of hard drive space occupied by Win 7.

 

I did some investigating on the web and found some interesting facts. First I ran this Free Disk Space Analyzer:

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

 

This analyzer provided me with a visual picture of the SIZE of every folder and file on my hard drive. Two files inside Win 7 were HUGE, the pagefile.sys and the hiberfil.sys. These two files took up almost two thirds of the 43.2 GB Win 7 was using on my SSD. After further investigation I learned that Win 7 allocates an equivalent amount of HD space to the pagefile.sys in proportion to the amount of RAM installed on your computer, 16 GB in my case. A similar amount is allocated to the HIBERNATION MODE or hilerfil.sys.

 

The amount of HD space these files use can be manually set OR turned off completely (e.g. if you never use hibernation mode it can be disabled) if you want to reclaim precious HD space from Windows. I recovered 27.8 GB in about 15 minutes following the steps within the links below. Win 7 pro NOW occupies only 16.3 GB of my SSD.

 

HIBERNATION MODE

http://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/29161-pagefile-sys-hiberfil-sys.html

 

HUGE PAGEFILE

http://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/15568-huge-pagefile-sys-file.html

[PiptopiaX 10]

Very informative, thank you.