Recover Space on C Dive SSD

Easy Way to Free up Space on your SSD Hard Drive

Check out Britec09 fix here...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmOI9El0C6s

* Computer hard drive getting full?
* Need to reclaim back some used space?
* PC really sluggish?
* Need to free up some used hard drive space?
* Low Disk Space?
* Free Up Hard-Drive Space?

Well you are in luck, I am going to show you how to claim back used hard drive space, computer hard drives run real slow when full to capacity, with SSD solid state drives being really small, your hard drive fills up real fast, running a with a full hard drive can put wear and tear on a hard drive and make your computer system slow.

We are going to use WinDirStat, it’s a free program that scans your hard drive and gives you a full report of the size of folders in that folder tree, and it’s a great way of detecting what folders are hogging your hard disk space.

I used Ninite to download the WinDirStat program

Download
https://ninite.com/

My hard drive was red "Low Disk Space" and full to 92% use space and after running WinDirStat and Disk Cleanup, I got that down to 38.5% used space. That’s a lot of reclaimed space that I need on my SSD.

Run Out of Space on your SSD - How to Up-size a Solid State Hard Drive

For months I have been receiving a warning of low disc space on my C Drive. The 120GB OCZ SSD (Solid State Drive) I installed a couple of years ago certainly improved the performance of my Desktop PC, but 120GB is not much space even when you only use it for the main OS and the other stuff that is best run from the Root.

The plan was to replace the existing OCZ Vertex 3 120GB SSD with an OCZ Vector 180GB SSD. I had tried cloning the disc while installed in the PC but I could not get the Free Acronis software supplied with the replacement SSD to install so I decided to use a Freecom Hard Drive Dock Duplicator...

The beauty of this piece of kit is, it does not have to be connected to a computer and you do not need any software to clone a disc. WARNING always backup your data before paying around with a HDD. See my comment at the end of this post.

Instructions

Carefully remove the drive you want to clone from your computer, beware of static, ground yourself before starting. Make sure the Duplicator is switched off.  Place your old SSD in the Duplicator slot marked Source and the New SSD in to the slot marked Target. Press the On/Off switch to turn the Duplicator On, then hold down the Dup/PC switch for 4 seconds, this should now be Red, press the Start button. The  tiny LED's along side each drive will flash and then turn Blue. The Progress Bar on the right below the Freecom badge will be Blue, these count down the progress of the data transfer, when the bar reaches 100% the transfer is complete. I waited for the Dup button to turn Blue as the Freecom imply that it will, but it doesn't. It took me a couple of hours to transfer 140GB. Turn the Duplicator Off and use the eject button to remove your New SSD.

Reinstall the New SSD in your computer, again beware of static. All being well your computer should reboot as normal only FASTER. Go into Start and type Partition in the search box.  One of the options to appear will be "Create and Format Hard Disc Partitions" Click this and the Disc Management Window will open. If the your original SSD was smaller than the New SSD  you will notice that only part of the new SSD is active. The disc has effectively been partitioned. Unbelievably the Windows Disc Manager will not allow you to enlarge the active partition to utilise all the disc space. The simple solution is to use a piece of Free software called AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard Edition. Follow the instructions on on how to resize a partition at SSDHDD.org. The general opinion is that this piece of software works without any risk of damaging the disc. Read the reviews here. I have to say it worked a treat.

Warning

My PC thinks it has had a heart transplant, the increase in performance is most welcome. Now for the heart stopper. For some strange reason I decided to put the OLD SSD back in the PC for starters. To my horror the PC would not Boot, there was an MBR problem, can't remember the exact error message. After fiddling around for a few moments I gave up and decided to put the NEW SSD in. Bingo, it booted up first go, and fast. Job done with only minimum heart failure. Still not sure what happened to the original HDD in the cloning process, but will try to find out and report back. Oh yes, shop around for your replacement SSD the prices seem to vary enormously even for the same item. The price of the OCZ Vector 180GB SSD varied from £52, what I paid for it, to £133!

Solid State Drive (SSD) - Optimising Drive Space

Re-bloged fron ZDNet

Solid-state drives are wicked fast. They can breathe new life into a PC whose performance is being dragged down by a slow conventional hard drive. They’re also expensive and (at least for now) limited in total capacity. So how do you get the performance benefits of an SSD upgrade without breaking the bank?

Read this article on the ZDNet website to discover how.

Windows 7 and SSDs: Cutting your system drive down to size

Free Up Disk Space on a Solid State Drive (SSD) in Windows 7

Like many folk these days my main PC main drive (Drive C:) is a Solid State Drive (SSD).  Due to the cost of these devices it is tempting to fit a much smaller capacity than a typical mechanical hard drive (HDD),  mine SSD is only 120GB. This small size means you have to be very careful about conserving disc space. For example I locate most of my non critical software on a second mechanical hard drive (Drive D:). Drive C: is reserved for the operating system and the likes of Adobe Photoshop. This means that rather sooner than later you will face the "not enough free space" problem no matter how careful you are. Which is the problem I just ran into. I have been quite strict about running the standard Windows 7 Disk Cleanup utility. I have also been careful to delete or relocating any unwanted software.

When searching for a solution I came across a very good blog post: 7 Ways to Free Up Disk Space on an SSD in Windows 7.  The post suggested followin these steps:-

1. Disable hibernation 
2. Decrease the size of the page file
3. Turn off System Restore
4. Perform a Disk Cleanup regularly
5. Use a third party disk cleaning tool regularly
6. Uninstall programs you do not use
7. Disable File Content Indexing

I followed most of the instructions and managed to release 12 GB of space, that's 10%.
I missed out steps 3 - Turn Off System Restore and 5 - Use Third Party Cleaning Tool. But I will look into these options later.The two steps that seemed to make the biggest difference where steps 2 and 7.

Follow this link to the original blog post.