How big is your system partition?

I do not do anything fancy with my strip mall computer shop built Midtower Desktop PC with ATX motherboard.

No games. No cloud storage. No video card.

I have 6 SSD. The lower 3 are NVME : one in M2 slot and two in PCIE slots.

A lot of MSI fans here

I use MSI Mobo and GPU exclusively.

This is my PC currently.



Rebuilding it this weekend, Amazon willing, starting with this.



Note: When finished it will match the system 1 specs I listed in my computers.

This is my main rig!!! All my important backups are on the cloud / external drives!!!

Sqrly said:

I move all user folder I can to a seperate drive.
All games are installed on another drive.

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MS actually plans to do something like this in Windows 12, at last.

Sqrly said:

I installed W10 on 10.2020, The OS and other programs are using 92GB of space ATM.

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That is quite a lot, but if you have big apps or store games, they can be moved as well.

Sqrly said:

So I'm asking, of those that have been using W11 for some time now, how much space is your system using?

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I have 65GB, only because they said that is the required minimum, though in reality it is 52GB.
My real usage is usually around 20GB, system disk compressed, no pagefile or reserved space (7GB).
I have moved steam, docs and browser's caches to other partitions to keep it clean, some using symlinks.
It makes system backup small and fast to create and restore. I only wished, I could use "wasted" free space.

I'm late to this thread, but here are my 2 cents on the topic:

I've always had mixed feelings about this topic but finally settled on a solution that works well for me.

On the one hand, I like a single large C: drive, because that prevents me from running into a situation where I later regret that I gave too much or too little space to the OS partition or to my data partition. This way, it is all just one big pool of space with no need to ever shuffle space between the OS and data partitions.

On the other hand, by having just one big partition, it makes my daily image backups huge because stuff that changes frequently, like virtual machines, result in really big backups getting created.

Well, I finally figured out a method that works for me...

I now use just one big partition that is both my OS and data partition. I modify a registry entry so that my daily image backups do NOT include data such as my Virtual Machines and various other data folders. This makes my backups small just as if I had two separate partitions. As for the data on the C: drive, I do a separate file and folder backup (not disk image) that holds just my data that the disk image does not capture. Finally, temporary stuff like my Virtual Machines I don't even bother to backup at all.

So, that give me the best of both worlds: A single large partition with no need to ever shuffle space between a data and OS partition, and also reasonably sized and well managed backups.

hsehestedt said:

Well, I finally figured out a method that works for me...

I now use just one big partition that is both my OS and data partition. I modify a registry entry so that my daily image backups do NOT include data such as my Virtual Machines and various other data folders.

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Yes, I do that for some of my machines that multi-boot with native boot vhdx. I exclude all the .vhdx files from my backup images. Here's how to do it...

I've been using windows since 3.1 and I've learned from bad experiences that it's best practice to not keep anything I don't want to lose on the same physical disk as the OS.

I admit I've only had to reinstall 10 once on one PC (Home version that we are going to upgrade to pro) so it has gotten a lot better but old habits die hard. Back when I was running Win 7 I used to do a clean reinstall once a year.

I always do clean installs when moving to a newer OS too. Well, I'll have to do an upgrade to move from 10 to 11 for free but then after 11 is activated I'll wipe the drive and do a clean install.

Sqrly said:

I always do clean installs when moving to a newer OS too. Well, I'll have to do an upgrade to move from 10 to 11 for free but then after 11 is activated I'll wipe the drive and do a clean install.

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If you have Windows 10 activated on that system, then you can directly perform a clean install of Win 11. There is no need to upgrade first. As far as activation is concerned, Windows 10 and 11 are the same thing.

hsehestedt said:

If you have Windows 10 activated on that system, then you can directly perform a clean install of Win 11. There is no need to upgrade first. As far as activation is concerned, Windows 10 and 11 are the same thing.

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Sweet, info like that is why I come to this forum.

Your info does apply to retail yes? I assume so because afaik you can't transfer an OEM key to a new mobo as it is stored in the bios.

As I started with a retail copy of window 7 pro and I'm building a new system, mobo, cpu, mem, C: drive, I expect to end up on the phone with support to reactivate Windows 10. Going straight to a clean 11 install after that will save some time.

The last piece, an Intel i9-14900K just arrived today. Tomorrow will be a busy day.

EDIT: Actually, since I don't have to do the upgrade step, I can link my current activation key to a Microsoft account just before I take this PC apart (I only use local accounts). Then I setup 10 on the new hardware with that Microsoft account and it should active online automatically. Then I can do the clean "offline" install of 11 and it should activate just as easy.

Sqrly said:

Your info does apply to retail yes? I assume so because afaik you can't transfer an OEM key to a new mobo as it is stored in the bios.

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Good point - you are absolutely correct on this.

I ended up going with 150GB and it's practically back to the original size.

Note: You must populate the unused space with a volume before you try resizing the WinRE partition (Fresh install still makes it 250mb) or it will use up all the unused space

Hi,
With MS new recovery partition policy the system partition is as big as the disk is lol

But changing that silly parameter I keep the RE in front of C and larger

I generally keep C at 250gb "so I can easily restore an image to a 256gb sata ssd if I want to or need to" and os/ programs and some personal files which are duplicated elsewhere usage is a little under 90gb.

Ghot said:

MSI always did have the coolest dragon logos.


That red dragon statue is pretty cool though.

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No I do

ThrashZone said:

No I do

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I dunno, I have this wallpaper one, it looks really nice @ 2k in HDR10

ThrashZone said:

No I do

View attachment 90720

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That's still... MSI

Ghot said:

That's still... MSI

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Hi,
No I redrew with coral draw from a very different dragon some of vector files are likely still on sevenforums I don't have any of them anymore just the wallpapers.

Usually around 60 - 70 GB

Disk Geometry --say 2TB

EFI (100MB), MSR, Windows 11(60GB) Recovery(560MB) then rest of disk FREE --- can be re-assigned for further windows, Linux, data etc.

Cheers
jimbo

Ghot said:

That's still... MSI

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No, that's unique.

Scroll up and take a close look at both the side of my PC and on the chipset inside, that's the official MSI dragon, as is the wallpaper I posted.

Since this thread wandered all over, and that's fine, it's been fun, I had to add this pic of my PC rebuilt with the new parts.

The new Mobo has 2 8-pin CPU power sockets. The extra cables I had aren't long enough to completley hide

ThrashZone said:

Hi,
No I redrew with coral draw from a very different dragon some of vector files are likely still on sevenforums I don't have any of them anymore just the wallpapers.

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Sqrly said:

No, that's unique.

Scroll up and take a close look at both the side of my PC and on the chipset inside, that's the official MSI dragon, as is the wallpaper I posted.

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MSI Dragon pics