Will windows ever need 1tb or more drive space

If i remember from my early norton days, the win98 OS was about 32,000 files. And now win7 is what about 90,000 and eats up most of a 132 GB drive. I just ran ccleaner and it cleaned 133mb of stuff, which is more storage than my internal hard drive back with win98 and thats just cache stuff now.

Sadly the reality is that the larger they make hard drives the more features and OS space you need and the more software sizes grow so they always offset each other.

Right now i have a 200 gb hd for the OS only. A 500GB hard drive for my other stuff which is almost gone, a 160 gb hard drive that i use for specific stuff. And an external 1TB hard drive that is always buzzen.

Im curious when the day will come that in order to even accommodate the OS you will need a minimum of 1tb drive.

Is it really windows? I have windows 7 Pro/ultimate virtual PCs with 30-40GB partitions for windows and it's ok there is enough free space.. of course its only windows and some essential software. some time ago installed windows 7pro (32bit) with all updates and no cleaning takes about 25GB..
Maybe you are using some heavy software that takes lot of space and confuse it with windows or include your data?

my pc with 80GB SSD has enough space for windows 8 pro and essential software like office etc. and still has around 30-40% free space.. I use some 2-3TB spinners for my data (but that has nothing to do with windows) HD movies, high resolution photos etc. takes lots of space.

I still remember older days when my PC had 60MB (not GB) HDD it was running 3.1 windows and dos :)
and file number has almost nothing to do with space it takes to store because those files can be 1MB files or 1GB files :)

Hi

Have you tried clearing your drive of unnecessary files. If you need to perform a disk cleanup you can do it by hitting WINDOWS KEY + R and typing '%windir%\system32\cleanmgr.exe' without quotes. Make sure your copy of Windows 7 is legitimate and you dont have any viruses using up space.
If you dont clear temporary files in Windows then eventually you could build up terabytes of space just from Windows programs alone but if you maintain your programs then I doubt Windows will ever need more than a few hundred GBs and the way archiving software improves, files will become smaller per byte of data anyway.

Hope this helped :)

- JamesAS

Until Win 8 came out, showing M$ wants to lighten Windows (aka, dumb it down), I would have said that someday Windows would need 1 TB but that wouldn't happen until my children, and, probably, my grandchildren, were long dead.

If you put Windows 7, along with its associated files, in it's own drive or partition, it should rarely need more than 35GB. I'm an exception to that rule since I have a huge amount of RAM and have to keep Hibernate enabled so, even with System Restore disabled, I'm using 56GB on my boot drive.

Page file and system restore can chew up a bit of space, these things can easily be remedied to free up more drive space.

BrightBlessings said:

Page file and system restore can chew up a bit of space, these things can easily be remedied to free up more drive space.

As can the hyberfil.sys file. Mine is 24GB.