Cyclic Variation of SSD free disk space: WinDirStat results

Question

When I first start my PC it says I have only have 1.1 GB free space! However when I restart it says 11.4 GB, if I then restart again it goes back to 1.1GB and so on. The actual figures are getting smaller over time but then difference is fairly constant at about 10GB. (I'm running windows7 pro SP1).

From researching the problem if seems that PageFile and Or Hiberfil may be to blame. In addition if you look at the jpeg of the WinDirStat results you can see that more of the difference can be attributed to the system files.

1.) Have I done enough to prove that Pagefile of Hiberfil are causing the problem? If not what extra work should I do?

2.) Would PageFile/Hiberfil cause the cyclical changes in free disk space I've been experiencing?

Baz

The first picture shows 11.4GB free

The second shows only 1.1GB free

Answer 1

If you, from a command prompt, run the following commands:

cd \
dir /A:SH *.sys

You will see the files. On my own Windows 8.1 machine, I get:

 Directory of C:\

2015-05-21  08:53     6,792,314,880 hiberfil.sys
2015-05-21  08:53     1,342,177,280 pagefile.sys
2015-05-21  08:53        16,777,216 swapfile.sys
               3 File(s)  8,151,269,376 bytes
               0 Dir(s)  214,779,428,864 bytes free

So simply run the same commands under the 2 different free space situations to get your answer.

If you can update your question with the amount of RAM you have, it might also shed some further light. However, if your drive is too small, you need to free some space. This is the disadvantage of running on an SSD.

You could turn off the hibernation feature which should remove (or allow you to remove) the hiberfil.sys That file should be around a similar size to the amount of RAM you have installed. I have 8GB of RAM for example and my file is just over 6GB.

Your pagefile is also related to RAM but differently as you are likely to see that file grow dependent on the RAM you need vs the RAM you have. Running too much with too little RAM will make it grow.

UPDATE: As you cannot hibernate due to other issues, you should disable this feature.

Moving the pagefile to another drive if you have one is an option though actually you will probably get much better performance (unless the 2nd disk is also an SSD) by moving files used less often such as images or music.

Answer 2

A page file starts small and grows as needed. You must be running some memory intensive application(s).

Running Firefox and Chrome with hundreds of tabs open requires a HUGE amount of memory.

To view memory usage:

• In Firefox, navigate to about:memory and click "Measure"
• In Chrome, navigate to chrome://memory.

Manually setting the page file size will reduce some overhead,

Consider adding RAM to match usage or reducing usage to match your RAM.