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I have an SSD with ~125GB formatted, and it claims ~99GB are consumed. It has been rapidly consuming storage space for weeks. I have found many instances of unexplained SSD consumption online, none of which seemed to have my answer. SSD Data Loss Over Time

My user's directory has been properly moved to another HDD with a junction so that none of my normal data storage is done on the SSD. Windows and Program Files are still present.

However, the strange thing is that I only have 46GB of data on the drive as confirmed by directory tree listings and Total Commander viewing hidden and system files. Display with Hidden Files

WinDirStat, manual inspection, and any other storage consumption analysis tool report 46GB of data on the drive when launched from a copy of Windows running on the SSD. Storage Analysis This is a big discrepancy from the ~99GB consumed. Where is all my free space?

Kevin Panko
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user1695505
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5 Answers5

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If you did not run WinDirStat as admin, it would only be able to report on space used by files that it is allowed to see.

Run it again as administrator, and it should start showing you the total picture of where the space has gone.

Kevin Panko
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So what is taking up all this space? System restore. I was able to determine this by loading the drive through another computer and viewing hidden/system files.

In my case System Restore was currently configured to consume 50% of the storage space of the drive, thus this massive System Volume Information folder. To reconfigure, [Right Click]Computer --> Properties --> System Protection (on right) --> Configure Culprit

user1695505
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WinDirStat does not report folders owned by SYSTEM user. In my case I had a 32 Gb folder C:\Sysmon, not accessible to administrator user and not reported by WinDirStat.

Use another tool like SpaceSniffer that is able to scan also folders owned by SYSTEM user.

If you access to a folder owned by SYSTEM user, you need to reboot windows in recovery mode and then use command line mode or you can also use WindowsPE.

Stefano Balzarotti
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-1

Running WinDirStat as any admin may not help in certain cases, in my case for files which were created by aborted XBox game pass downloads. These will only be seen by WinDirStat if it is started from the (built in in Windows but usually disabled) Administrator account.

Reiner Zorn
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In my case, the drive is in exFAT format where the files may use much more space than their actual size. The missing free space is at the end of the big disk blocks for many small files.

Windows reports that the disk almost full: 6.14 GB free of 119 GB

WinDirStat reports that only 16.8 GB is used for the whole disk.

Windows directory properties show both the sum of file sizes (3.07GB) and the disk usage (16.5GB) for one of the directories. WinDirStat reports 3.1GB for this directory.

The unix du (disk usage) utility (in MINGW64, Git Bash in my case) shows the real disk usage including the empty space at the end of files: output of the "du -sh" command, 17 GB for the directory in question.

Jozsef Frigo
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