How I'm saving hard drive space

[stangbat]

Now days, conserving hard drive space isn't too big of a deal. But I recently upgraded to a 30 gb OCZ Vertex SSD, so I'm a bit more conscious about how much space I'm using on my C: drive (which is the Vertex). Unfortunately it seems like Win 7 doesn't give you quite as many options for removing Windows components as XP did. Not that XP's options let you trim a lot of fat.

With 30 gb to play with, I want to put as much as practical on the SSD to take advantage of its speed. And I also want some free space because TRIM and garbage collection for SSDs needs space to move things around. So here is what I've done to keep things small. By the way, this is a desktop PC, not a notebook.

-Used vLite and removed the language packs, sample images and sounds, screensavers, and TV tuner drivers. Total savings: about 2 gigs.
-Disable hibernation and use sleep instead. Total savings: the size of your RAM (in my case 4 gb).
-Reduce pagefile size from 4 gb to a minimum of 512 and max of 1 gb. Total savings: The size of your RAM minus 500 mb. In my case, 3.5 gb. I know some people will claim to disable the pagefile entirely, but I'm erring on the side of caution.
So in my case, I have freed up 9.5 gigs with this alone.

After installing Office 2010 beta, I saw that the MSOCache folder was 650 mb. Some searching lead me to find out that this folder contained the install files for Office. They are needed when you update Office, so I ended up moving this to another drive (some registry editing was necessary and a symlink just in case something else tries to drop files in c:\MSOCache.)

So after all this, I've installed a good portion of my applications and I'm only using 10.4 gb. Included in this 10.4 gb are the following:
-Office 2010 without Outlook or OneNote
-Firefox with Flash, Java
-Thunderbird with all my email
-OpenOffice
-Visio
-Foxit Reader
-Macrium True Image (disk imaging for backups)
-Squeezebox Server
-Ccleaner
-MozBackup
-Win7 Firewall Control
-Microsoft Security Essentials (I'm trying it instead of AVG Free)
-System Restore is using 380 mb of a possible 1.2 gb

There are a few other little things installed that I'm not listing, and I still have more things to install. But as you can see, you can get Win 7 down to a manageable size, install quite a bit of essential stuff, and not take up a ton of room.

So that's what I've done so far. Any other tips/suggestions for saving space are welcome.

 

[pparks1]

Why not just move the page file entirely to your secondary storage drive? That's what I did to save space on my 80GB Intel SSD.

Also, you can move the browser cache locations for firefox and IE to your storage drive as well..saving the small temp writes. While it won't save you lots of space...it will save you quite a number of writes on the SSD drive.

 

[whs]

You are doing very well. I am at 17GB on my 80GB Intel but I gave Win7 only a 42GB partition. The rest is a data partition.
One thing you can do is reduce the shadowstorage to a max of 300MB (which is the minimum allowed) and do more frequent Macrium backups. I do one nearly every day to the internal HDD and it takes only a few minutes for the system and data partitions together. Once in a while, I also take one to an external disk for additional safety. That takes about 25 minutes.
For a while I ran with a page file of 200/200MB (which is also the minimum), but that was neither here nor there.
But overall I think you will be fine. You have 20GBs to go and that is a LOT of space.

PS. My 60GB Vertex I just flashed to FW level 1.4 (for Trim). That will go on another system. But there I will move my data to an HDD.

 

[Frostmourne]

You are doing very well. I am at 17GB on my 80GB Intel but I gave Win7 only a 42GB partition. The rest is a data partition.
One thing you can do is reduce the shadowstorage to a max of 300MB (which is the minimum allowed) and do more frequent Macrium backups. I do one nearly every day to the internal HDD and it takes only a few minutes for the system and data partitions together. Once in a while, I also take one to an external disk for additional safety. That takes about 25 minutes.
For a while I ran with a page file of 200/200MB (which is also the minimum), but that was neither here nor there.
But overall I think you will be fine. You have 20GBs to go and that is a LOT of space.

PS. My 60GB Vertex I just flashed to FW level 1.4 (for Trim). That will go on another system. But there I will move my data to an HDD.

Not necessarily, Dragon Age: Origins takes 20GB to install. I'd be careful with removing too much stuff from 7 - things might break.

 

[whs]

You are doing very well. I am at 17GB on my 80GB Intel but I gave Win7 only a 42GB partition. The rest is a data partition.
One thing you can do is reduce the shadowstorage to a max of 300MB (which is the minimum allowed) and do more frequent Macrium backups. I do one nearly every day to the internal HDD and it takes only a few minutes for the system and data partitions together. Once in a while, I also take one to an external disk for additional safety. That takes about 25 minutes.
For a while I ran with a page file of 200/200MB (which is also the minimum), but that was neither here nor there.
But overall I think you will be fine. You have 20GBs to go and that is a LOT of space.

PS. My 60GB Vertex I just flashed to FW level 1.4 (for Trim). That will go on another system. But there I will move my data to an HDD.

Not necessarily, Dragon Age: Origins takes 20GB to install. I'd be careful with removing too much stuff from 7 - things might break.

That must be a game you are referring to. I never touch them. So maybe I am "safe".

 

[Frostmourne]

Yes, but 1TB hard drives are standard now so paying more for a 30GB SSD doesn't make sense, more speed or not.

 

[pparks1]

Yes, but 1TB hard drives are standard now so paying more for a 30GB SSD doesn't make sense, more speed or not.

The performance benefits are certainly worth it to some. Unless you are using an SSD drive...it's hard to understand. I can understand some who wouldn't feel the loading time benefits were worth it. For me, I went from 12 second load times in games like Wolfenstein to 2 seconds. I felt this extra performance and no noise justified my purchase price. Not to mention, no reason for prefetch, no reason for indexing, no reason to defrag, etc.

 

[Frostmourne]

Yes, but 1TB hard drives are standard now so paying more for a 30GB SSD doesn't make sense, more speed or not.

The performance benefits are certainly worth it to some. Unless you are using an SSD drive...it's hard to understand. I can understand some who wouldn't feel the loading time benefits were worth it. For me, I went from 12 second load times in games like Wolfenstein to 2 seconds. I felt this extra performance and no noise justified my purchase price. Not to mention, no reason for prefetch, no reason for indexing, no reason to defrag, etc.

I'd rather keep 1TB than the benefits of a tiny SSD.

 

[whs]

Yes, but 1TB hard drives are standard now so paying more for a 30GB SSD doesn't make sense, more speed or not.

The performance benefits are certainly worth it to some. Unless you are using an SSD drive...it's hard to understand. I can understand some who wouldn't feel the loading time benefits were worth it. For me, I went from 12 second load times in games like Wolfenstein to 2 seconds. I felt this extra performance and no noise justified my purchase price.

I can only agree. It is a completely new system feeling. And the 30GB Vertex was sold at Newegg for only $99 a couple of weeks ago. I was tempted to get two of them for a Raid0 setup. That really flies at 360MB data transfer rates. But now I got 200MB which is not all that bad either - even compared to some of those 15,000 RPM Fujitsus that are not cheap either. And for mass data, I use the HDDs.

 

[stangbat]

Why not just move the page file entirely to your secondary storage drive? That's what I did to save space on my 80GB Intel SSD.

Also, you can move the browser cache locations for firefox and IE to your storage drive as well..saving the small temp writes. While it won't save you lots of space...it will save you quite a number of writes on the SSD drive.

I may move the pagefile off the SSD as I fill the drive more. But for right now I've got 500 mb to spare for it.

I did change my browser cache location to RAM, forgot about that. I followed a tip on the OCZ formums regarding this.

One thing you can do is reduce the shadowstorage to a max of 300MB (which is the minimum allowed) and do more frequent Macrium backups. I do one nearly every day to the internal HDD and it takes only a few minutes for the system and data partitions together. Once in a while, I also take one to an external disk for additional safety. That takes about 25 minutes.

I'll have to look into that. So far I've only made one image as a clean start point. It is time I make another.

Not necessarily, Dragon Age: Origins takes 20GB to install. I'd be careful with removing too much stuff from 7 - things might break.

I don't game anymore so I don't have to worry about something taking up that much space. Regarding breaking, that is why I didn't remove much with vLite. On my first vLite install, I removed the Tablet PC stuff (I think) and it broke the snipping tool. So I did it again and was much more conservative and just took out the things I was pretty sure I could remove.

Yes, but 1TB hard drives are standard now so paying more for a 30GB SSD doesn't make sense, more speed or not.

That's easy to say until you use one. I made no other changes to my equipment other than the SSD and it is like an entirely new machine. Night and day. It really is that big of an improvement. The drive I have now is $99 at Newegg after rebate. It is tempting to get another and run them in RAID 0. Kidding...I'd better not.

Thanks for all the tips, encouragement, and info guys.

 

[pparks1]

I'd rather keep 1TB than the benefits of a tiny SSD.

And nobody has an issue with that either. For me, I've got the benefits of an SSD as well as the 1TB storage drive. In the end, I paid $289 for my 80GB SSD and $99 for my 1TB WD Caviar Black...so less than $400 for a screaming fast system with over 1TB of drive space. Twas worth it to me. Now, if I could only have 1 hard drive total...well then I would go without the benefits of the SSD..but because I can have more than 1...I jumped onboard.

You will notice 1 trend among SSD owners. We all agree that it was expensive...but it's almost unheard of for a modern SSD owner to say it wasn't worth it. That does speak volumes.

 

[whs]

I'd rather keep 1TB than the benefits of a tiny SSD.

And nobody has an issue with that either. For me, I've got the benefits of an SSD as well as the 1TB storage drive. In the end, I paid $289 for my 80GB SSD and $99 for my 1TB WD Caviar Black...so less than $400 for a screaming fast system with over 1TB of drive space. Twas worth it to me. Now, if I could only have 1 hard drive total...well then I would go without the benefits of the SSD..but because I can have more than 1...I jumped onboard.

You will notice 1 trend among SSD owners. We all agree that it was expensive...but it's almost unheard of for a modern SSD owner to say it wasn't worth it. That does speak volumes.

You must have bought that Intel a while ago. I was lucky, about 6 weeks ago Newegg had it on sale for $189. That's when I got it. But for the 60GB Vertex i paid over $200 in March. Their prices seem to fluctuate daily.

 

[pparks1]

You must have bought that Intel a while ago. I was lucky, about 6 weeks ago Newegg had it on sale for $189. That's when I got it. But for the 60GB Vertex i paid over $200 in March. Their prices seem to fluctuate daily.

I got the Intel drive, 2-3 months ago. Today, it's $299 on NewEgg's site.

I don't believe what you got for $189 is the same thing. I think you have the 1.8" version of the drive and that version doesn't support TRIM. Some coworkers of mine came running to me with that flyer going, "i'm gonna get what you got for over $100 less". After I read the specs and the details, I sent them an email and explained the differences in the $189 version of the drive. None of these coworkers actually purchased it.

 

[whs]

You must have bought that Intel a while ago. I was lucky, about 6 weeks ago Newegg had it on sale for $189. That's when I got it. But for the 60GB Vertex i paid over $200 in March. Their prices seem to fluctuate daily.

I got the Intel drive, 2-3 months ago. Today, it's $299 on NewEgg's site.

I don't believe what you got for $189 is the same thing. I think you have the 1.8" version of the drive and that version doesn't support TRIM. Some coworkers of mine came running to me with that flyer going, "i'm gonna get what you got for over $100 less". After I read the specs and the details, I sent them an email and explained the differences in the $189 version of the drive. None of these coworkers actually purchased it.

You are right. I have the 1.8" R1 without Trim. I am not sure yet how much of a difference that makes. But I will see once I use my Vertex with Trim.