Will windows ever need 1tb or more drive space

[durango1]

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.

 

[vaidas3]

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

 

[Boozad]

And now win7 is what about 90,000 and eats up most of a 132 GB drive.

A Clean Install of Windows 7 will not take up anywhere near 132GB.

 

[logicearth]

I'm using 25 GB and thats with a lot of extra stuff thrown in, applications and what have you, nothin been cleaned either.

 

[JamesAS]

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

 

[Slartybart]

A 40GB allocation sufficinetly holds Win7 plus some applications. I am currently oonly using about 24GB.

I do tend to clean up my system, at least monthly.

I helped a neighbor who complained that his SSD was nearly full and found a backup folder: windows.old.
See: How do I remove the Windows.old folder?

Removing that gave him nearly half of his drive back.

But to answer your question from days long gone... They'll never fill up my brand new 40 MB drive!

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

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.

 

[strollin]

I have a machine that only has a 20G C: drive and Win 7 fits on there fine with around 7G free.

 

[BrightBlessings]

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

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

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.

 

[Britton30]

The last time I did a full install with SP1 and all updates, board and hardware drivers, disabled Hibernate, set Restore space to 5% of a 256GB SSD, the install was 15.6GB, no software other than security.

 

[Layback Bear]

durango1 I presume after all those post you understand it's not Windows 7 using up all that hard drive. Could give us one of these so we can take a look.

By Brink:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/9733-screenshots-files-upload-post-seven-forums.html



These could also be helpful

By Brink:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/129976-hard-disk-space-free-up-recover.html

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/818-disk-cleanup-open-use.html


.

 

[M1GU31]

No I have windows installed on a 60gb ssd drive with a couple apps and have 25gbs free. You can free up space by moving restore points or img's to a 2nd drive. Also disabling hibernate if you don't use it will free drive space. You really only would need 1tb if you have a lot of big apps like games or other media files. I keep all my games , other big apps and music and movies. Also my img backups and restore points on my spare 500gb hdd. I say for windows alone with a couple apps a 60gb drive is the size I would recommend for a windows install though I've installed win7 on 40 gb drives with about 15 Gbs to spare like on my bros hdd.

 

[dwarfer66]

My windows partition includeds ALL my apps, not games takes up on 57mb. And I have quite a few BIG apps.

 

[TanyaC]

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

That's for sure. With 32gb of memory, I end up with a 32gb swap file. Moved it off the C: drive though.

Like most replies here, with ALL apps, including one which is 15gb on it's own, my total consumption for Windows and apps is only 33gb.

 

[lehnerus2000]

Disc Space Analyser

My install W7 Ultimate (64 bit) uses ~25GB, which includes:

• Office 2007 (~1 GB)
• VMware Workstation 7 (~3 GB)
• ~60 other programs.

My user files are stored on separate partitions (e.g. Documents, Pictures, Downloads, Music & Videos).

Try using a disc space analyser like WinDirStat to work out what is using up your HDD space.
WinDirStat - Windows Directory Statistics

I use the analyser that comes with Glary Utilities.

​

 

[Abhishek1108]

You must have some heavy softwares eating space and documents in Libraries
Try cleaning your recycle bin.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

My install W7 Ultimate (64 bit) uses ~25GB, which includes:

• Office 2007 (~1 GB)
• VMware Workstation 7 (~3 GB)
• ~60 other programs.

My user files are stored on separate partitions (e.g. Documents, Pictures, Downloads, Music & Videos).

Try using a disc space analyser like WinDirStat to work out what is using up your HDD space.
WinDirStat - Windows Directory Statistics

I use the analyser that comes with Glary Utilities.

View attachment 288187
​

I much prefer Glary's analyzer to WinDirStat. In fact, I never could make any sense of WinDirStat (being color blind doesn't help).