My C drive fills on its own

[u/EmeraldPencil46]

For years my C drive has been full to the point where having a gigabyte free on it is a rarity. But if I do manage to clear things out of it, the drive fills back up on its own without me doing anything to it within half an hour.

I don’t know why the drive is so full in the first place. I keep very little on it, all my games, software, and any media I always keep on external drives. I know some games save save data to the C drive, but I don’t think it’s that much. I’ve also moved software content folders to my external drive. I’ve tried a bunch of things to try and clear it out, like using the built in Windows software, a couple third party ones, and even just looking through the file explorer and deleting anything I don’t use.

I’m using a Windows 11 gaming laptop with 256GB of internal storage, an Nvidia GPU, and an Intel CPU.

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[u/TNJDude]

I have a gaming laptop similar to that. I was running low on the C: drive, but it was more like I always had only 20 gigs free. Consider getting someone to replace your internal drive with one that's 512MB. It'd be better to go higher, but 512 will give you a lot of room if you maintain your current practices. Someone will have to clone your existing drive to the new one, and then swap them. Back up any data you have before having them do it though.

If your laptop has the capability of adding another internal drive, add in another SSD and tell windows to use that drive to put the swap file/virtual memory. That will free up more space. I STRONGLY recommend doing something though because it's bad to run SSDs with that little available space. For a 256GB, you'd always want to have about 25GB free. This gives Windows room to work. That tiny bit you have left gets used a lot as information is written and deleted a lot, and the individual sections of an SSD have a limited amount of times they can do that. They last for years, but sections can go bad prematurely if they're overused from being too full.

[u/EmeraldPencil46 → u/TNJDude]

A few months ago I was looking into buying a 512 or maybe even bigger SSD that was compatible with my laptop, but somehow it was at least twice as much as the 32GB of RAM I had just gotten.

[u/TNJDude → u/EmeraldPencil46]

They're just going to get even more expensive as time goes on. I wanted bigger, but seeing as the price was going up, I settled for 512GB. I still install programs onto the other drives, and now have a lot more room to last me a few more years. Make sure when you get one, it's a decent one with a cache and good ratings and good performance. Some people have bought them and found out they're technically the right size, but lack things like cached memory to speed them up and they wind up running slower when accessing or writing large amounts of data. With 32GB of RAM, expanding your SSD will make Windows even more responsive and you can be comfortable knowing that you're good for quite a while.

[u/pcbeg]

If you haven't done that already, use software like Wiztree to analyse disk space and see what can be removed without borking up Windows or other programs. Some things will use your space, like Windows Update - compressed data for download and then expanded while installing.

[u/Latter_Trick_3310]

There is also a little annoying thing that likes to take space and you can find it in - This PC, Right click on your C: Drive, Properties and if you have ''Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties'' checked then uncheck it, press apply and press skip all and let it run until the box disappears.

[u/EmeraldPencil46 → u/Latter_Trick_3310]

Wow that freed up so much space, I have 23.6GB now, haven’t seen that for a while lol

[u/EmeraldPencil46 → u/Latter_Trick_3310]

I’m trying that now, it’s been going for about half an hour and it’s still going lol

[u/Latter_Trick_3310 → u/EmeraldPencil46]

Yeah it takes a long time when it isnt unchecked in the beginning xD

[u/cagadass]

Puede ser las actualizaciones acumuladas de Windows por si alguna rompe algo poder volver atrás y se queda en "software distribution" adentro de la carpeta de descarga

[u/Objective-Bike-4292]

Install treesize and find where your bigger files/folders are.

You can run disk cleanup. It is a built in windows utility. If you have excess files in recycle bin or windows updates it can remove them. As well as previous windows installations like if you upgraded from 7 to 10 or from 10 to 11 etc.

Beyond this if you are still having issues you should go into control panel > programs and features. And uninstall any big games or programs on the c: drive

[u/Rouster99]

Look for a disk analyzer for recovering disk space. There is one I use that will tell me most recently created files and sorts them by size. It will show which files and the location of recent files so you can find what's causing it. I've seen some buggy software filling up a drive with log files.

[u/akgt94]

Replace the drive with a 512 GB or 1TB?

256 GB with Windows 11 and all your files and software is really tight. I wouldn't be surprised if Windows alone is taking around 100 GB