ssd inexplicably losing disk space

last week i noticed that my ssd, a new year old samsung 840 465gb with 5.34tb written, was down to 200 mb. i do have an op of 10% so i wasnt worried but i did delete some otherwise unused games from my steam folder. i got back 14gb.

today i got another low disk space warning and i was surprised to see my ssd at <200mg again. i havent installed anything except windows and steam updates in the past week. i have hibernation off and i did a restore point delete to make sure it wasnt that.

i thought it was some memory dumps since i play this game that has some known memory leaks and i tried the beta version of the game. however upon checking cleanup, windows only reported 7mb or so of memory dumps. also checked the game folder and the folder size seems appropriate for the proper install.

are there other areas i can check for memory dumps? also what other procedures can i do to investigate this issue?

 

Offhand it sounds like the drive is going bad. BTW, is it just me, or did you cut out mid sentence? Your drive was worse than you thought?

Edit- I guess I should clarify - I am assuming that your total drive space is decreasing, not that something is simply filling that space. There are programs that can show you what is taking up space on your drive.

 

my total drive space is not decreasing. using crystaldisk info and samsungs own magician software, s.m.a.r.t. data looks normal.

however i am not totally ruling out a hardware issue and thats why i posted this here. im also not seeing any issues in the game forum about memory leaks leading to large memory dump files, so i may rule that out too.

 

This is strange... You have pretty much ruled out the general issues.. Even windows updates wouldn't use up so much space in a short time.. I think personally you can do is to reinstall everything... There might be a lot of junk that might have accumulated over time and this should help reset it..

 

There is a Windows file called 'disk cleanup'. Have you tried running that? Just click on the 'Start' button and type 'disk cleanup'.

 

yup disk cleanup is the first thing i tried.

today i checked and i actually got back some 13gb, which is what is should be. could this be a symptom of regular ssd maintenance? my first ssd and i think ive read something like this.

 

Yep, great suggestion. I use disk cleanup almost weekly. I clean up my restore points as long as everything has been running well also. This usually gets a few gb back

 

Try check using WinDirStat.

 

To echo what others have suggested also have you tried deleting all but your most recent 'System Restore and Shadow Copies.' I find that this feature will usually get me back ~10gb of space. I do notice that after a month or so the available space on my C: drive decreases. That is when I go into C: properties and navigate to 'Clean system files' and then 'Disk Cleanup' finally click on the 'More options' tab. That is where the feature to delete 'System Restore and Shadow Copies' can be found. Just throwing those directions in for others who might not know about it.

 

disk cleanup and deleting old restore points are usually the first thing to try. ive done this myself but since my system is usually optimized it really has minimal effect on space recovery. i did run it just the same to be sure. also ran ccleaner, which i dont normally do.

will try windirstat to see what directories seem overbloated.

 

Run CCleaner which is much more agressive than windows disc cleanup.

Also, TreeSize is another useful utility to help see what directories are bloated.

I've known programs which have created large temp files which then haven't been deleted.

John

 

I use extended cleanup Disk Cleanup : Extended - Windows 7 Help Forums

 

I'd second John's recommendation... CC Cleaner is the best option!

 

just for general knowledge these are the procedures i went thru:

1. check s.m.a.r.t. raw data. if you find anything suspicious here, backup your data (if you haven already done so immediately)
2. check virtual memory, hibernation, indexing settings (i usually have all on off)
3. run diskcleanup
4. run ccleaner
5. run windirstat

i will add joseas recommendation to my list. so far i have not gotten back any usable space by doing the above. but as i mentioned previously, i got back 13gb recently (and not after doing the above). my low disk issues could be a symptom of regular ssd maintenance (my drive is 85% full). i am still monitoring it though.

 

if you are truly running into 200mb free left on the drive you are way too full. as you work and the drive is being used it needs breathing room. This especially if the programs being used are using scratch files or auto backups. It becomes very easy to run into walls. That 13gb did not just magically appear and had to come from somewhere.

 

the steps i took above only reported minimal hd space recovery ~100mb. the 13.8 gb i recovered is almost equivalent to the 14gb of games i deleted as per my op.

i am leaning towards the theory that what i experienced could be part and parcel of the ssd's trash collection and maintenance protocol. my 3yr old 840 uses tlc nand and afaik its trash collection is not as aggresive as other more modern ssd's. since this is both my work and play laptop, i have an adobe scratch disk in the drive; with many small office files; and lots of huge game .pak files. that combination could have made it a little more difficult for the drive to reallocate space for nand wear smoothing, even with the 10% op. the drive lamp was blinking with that dimmed light (indicating some operation going on) and i couldnt run benchmarks at that time sine i just got the 'preparing to initialize' prompt.

as mentioned previously, the drive space seemed to have corrected itself and benchmarks and performnce are same as before. however even if im leaning towards trash collection and wear levelling as the ultimate cause, im still monitoring and have everything essential fully backed up.

 

No, doesn't work like that. You mark the sectors as deleted, and that process is pretty much instant, and the space is reported as available. Then the sectors aren't wiped until overwritten or garbage collection runs, so you'll get a performance penalty on sustained writes.

So something was either dumping huge temp-files on you and then eventually deleting them (since the ssds are kind of fast and quiet, you don't notice as quickly...?), or maybe you just had a bunch of files copied to the paper bin, etc. But the reported free size on an ssd doesn't inexplicably report higher and lower available space before and after garbage collection runs, so it's something else. Routines hanging, badly set up temp, temp on different partition, windows swap that's not a fixed size, viruses, not viruses but just error reporting and memory dumps, etc., etc.

Can be all kinds of different things, but not wrongly reported free size.

 

yup i know thats how its supposed to work normally. but ive ruled out mostly everything you already mentioned. so there is that.

 

Ok. But... let's just be completely clear here. You're not noticing a 200Mb gap in reported free size before and after deleting 16Gb of files (..which would be normal, because Microsoft University Math). You're also not noticing hangs and then curious rescue operations (along with bad writes and sectors reported in SMART, and so on, which would be normal towards the end of an ssd's lifetime.... some time in 2040 if you bought it recently).

Instead, you're actually seeing 16Gb of space being eaten up for no reason. Or 16Gb of claimed space suddenly being freed up after a bit of idle and standby?

(disclaimer: I'm not trying to be annoying, or anything. It's a puzzle. Puzzles need to be solved. That's all. )

 

np i dont think youre being annoying.

yup basically that. had less than 200mg. deleted ~14gb worth of files. later on windows reported it shrunk to 200mb again and then it reverted back to ~14gb. did all the things i mentioned aside from scanning for viruses and malware. also did not touch my adobe programs nor did i delete the scratch disk (which is only 2gb). ssd benchmarks and functionality is as it was. someone suggested that it might be a failing drive but afaik, the symptoms of such are a drive that cannot be detected via bios or loses connectivity. ive never heard of a failing drive, failing nand chips or write expired nand chips losing disk space and then getting it back again...

 

14GB of free space on a 500GB drive is very small and I wonder if it may be hampering effective garbage management even though you have the 10% over-provisioning.

You really need to either do some major housekeeping to clear more space or invest in a higher capacity drive.

John

 

What antivirus are you running? I saw recently on another forum similar issue where Avast would automatically allocate 50% of the disc for system restore and would not honor manual settings.
Then again I have Avast and I do not have that issue so nothing is certain.

 

with my 3year old, tlc based ssd with conservative garbage collection and my type of data mix, 10% op might not be enough for efficient garbage collection. but i did come from ~200mb so that may be the original issue rather than 13gb plus 10%.

i use mbam plus mse. i doubt it was antivirus related but good to know about avast.

 

You really need to reinstall your OS and clean up your SSD.. It might be time to upgrade your 500GB HDD to a 1TB or 2TB one and move some stuff from the SSD to there...