Most people assign far too much Disk space to the Windows system

jimbo45 · Feb 25, 2022

Hi folks

If you organise your HDD's etc properly you can get a reasonable size Windows installation on quite a small anount of HDD disk space.
It should go without saying that only the OS and installed apps e.g Ms Office / Photoshop etc should reside on the system disk or partition and all user data and other files should be on other scratch partitions. Apart from not having to recover all your user data if you need to recover the OS you can backup the OS much quicker etc etc.

On this system I allocated 60 GB of which only around 50% is used.
I always wonder what people have on their Windows machines when I see an entire 512GB SSD assigned to the windows OS. !!

Cheers
jimbo

The-Hive · Feb 25, 2022

I never know what the correct amount is so I let windows sort it out as all Programs and data are on a different drive

ShamrockRig · Feb 25, 2022

Does it kill you inside that my C drive is 1tb and my D drive is 250? Everythings on the C drive. OS...Games and everything in between. My D drive is for some random things and any games i dont need on my M2. Guess what, I had to re-install windows. Lost hee-haw as we say in scotland xD
FYI you're language looks and sounds so much damn cooler than English

jimbo45 · Feb 25, 2022

Devlin1888 said:
Does it kill you inside that my C drive is 1tb and my D drive is 250? Everythings on the C drive. OS...Games and everything in between. My D drive is for some random things and any games i dont need on my M2. Guess what, I had to re-install windows. Lost hee-haw as we say in scotland xD
FYI you're language looks and sounds so much damn cooler than English

Hi there
I often have many OS versions of Windows on a single HDD / SSD -- but use them as Physical VHDX files
Then I can share data across the various versions which makes testing easier.

E.G on 1 HDD with 1 EFI partition and a large single NTFS partition containing 5 different bootable Windows instances (5 VHDX files) . No partitioning etc required for any of the Windows installs.

1) Bog standard (ENG) reference W10 system
2) W11 system (preview rel Eng)
3) W11 current Eng
4) W11 current Isl
5) Win PE bootable pre-install (command line) made from Ms Winpe Iso.

Cheers

(BTW Spoken Isl probably sounds not too different from Scots Gaelic. !!!)

jimbo

Winuser · Feb 25, 2022

No way could go with only 60GB. Just my apps and programs are taking up 66.9 GB

ShamrockRig · Feb 25, 2022

jimbo45 said:
Hi there
I often have many OS versions of Windows on a single HDD / SSD -- but use them as Physical VHDX files
Then I can share data across the various versions which makes testing easier.

E.G on 1 HDD with 1 EFI partition and a large single NTFS partition containing 5 different bootable Windows instances (5 VHDX files) . No partitioning etc required for any of the Windows installs.

1) Bog standard (ENG) reference W10 system
2) W11 system (preview rel Eng)
3) W11 current Eng
4) W11 current Isl
5) Win PE bootable pre-install (command line) made from Ms Winpe Iso.

View attachment 22872

Cheers

(BTW Spoken Isl probably sounds not too different from Scots Gaelic. !!!)

jimbo

Oaf, Fair do's man! Bit much for me but i understand you're reasoning!
Haha most of us Scots don't speak or learn Gaelic im afraid, Something that kinda went away in mainstream scotland.
I love Norse Mythology and Icelandic History! Spent a good chunk of time learning! Would love to go on Holiday to Iceland one day! Especially to do some MTB too!

ShamrockRig · Feb 25, 2022

Winuser said:
No way could go with only 60GB. Just my apps and programs are taking up 66.9 GB

My apps are into the hundreds of GB's. Albeit a lot of that is games, But technically still apps so yeah

BunnyJ · Feb 25, 2022

The-Hive said:
I never know what the correct amount is so I let windows sort it out as all Programs and data are on a different drive

I do the same.

NavyLCDR · Feb 25, 2022

I'm at 90GB used on my C: drive and all of my user library files are moved to D drive.

ShamrockRig · Feb 25, 2022

NavyLCDR said:
I'm at 90GB used on my C: drive and all of my user library files are moved to D drive.

I have 180gb left of my 1tb on my c drive

it does go up and down though. 180 free is rather low for me usually

DigitalGoat · Feb 25, 2022

The title of this thread should be : Most people who use their systems the exact same way I do, assign far too much space to the Windows system.
The truth of the matter is that everyone will use their systems according to their needs and preferences, you, jimbo45, make a lot of use of virtualisation for example, whereas I never use virtual drives.
Like a poster above, all my apps and games are on the same disk as Windows, an average Macrium image takes 3.5mins, my personal data (the stuffs what I makes :) ) is kept separate, as are backups.
This works for me on a 512Gb NVME drive. My current Windows install is now nearly 5 months old (Win10 - Win11), the previous Win10 was I believe over 2 years old.
There will be as many different ways of setting up a system as there will be opinions on how to setup a system.

Berton · Feb 25, 2022

I've removed 2 very nice Notebooks from Win10 about 4 or more semi-annual Version Upgrades back due to having only 32GB drives and not enough available space to work with in doing upgrades. Linux Mint didn't have the same issue and they work just fine. Running Win10 wasn't an issue, it was not having sufficient free space and not allowing USB or SD temporary storage during the Upgrades or Build updates to them.

Edwin · Feb 25, 2022

I keep everything on C: SSD, it's faster!

Winuser · Feb 25, 2022

I always move my user folders to drive D. @NavyLCDR, I no longer have to sets of user folders.

Winuser · Feb 25, 2022

BunnyJ said:
I do the same.

I use to split my drive so I could have the OS on one partition and my data on the other partition. Now I don't have too. On my new desktop the OS is on a 1 TB NVMe drive and my data is on a 1 TB SSD. On my old desktop I have the OS on a 500 GB NVMe drive and my data on a 2TB HDD.

BunnyJ · Feb 25, 2022

Winuser said:
I use to split my drive so I could have the OS on one partition and my data on the other partition. Now I don't have too. On my new desktop the OS is on a 1 TB NVMe drive and my data is on a 1 TB SSD. On my old desktop I have the OS on a 500 GB NVMe drive and my data on a 2TB HDD.

I have two extra drives so I don't have to use my C for anything other that the OS and apps.

pparks1 · Feb 25, 2022

jimbo45 said:
I always wonder what people have on their Windows machines when I see an entire 512GB SSD assigned to the windows OS. !!

Cheers
jimbo

I typically don't see much benefit in breaking up a drive into multiple partitions.

The "only" reason that I would do it these days would be to maybe isolate large games and VM's onto their own partition such that they don't have to be included in a Macrium image of my OS drive.

I'm also considering moving my OneDrive to at least another partition, or ideally it's own physical drive thus it wouldn't ever be restored in the event that I restored a Macrium image. The issue you run into here is if you create new files in OneDrive, and then restore your system back to say 4 days ago, OneDrive "thinks" after the restore that you deleted the files from your local machine and thus they get moved to the Recycle bin in the cloud. If you don't catch it, after a period of time they are gone.

jimbo45 · Feb 25, 2022

pparks1 said:
I typically don't see much benefit in breaking up a drive into multiple partitions.

The "only" reason that I would do it these days would be to maybe isolate large games and VM's onto their own partition such that they don't have to be included in a Macrium image of my OS drive.

I'm also considering moving my OneDrive to at least another partition, or ideally it's own physical drive thus it wouldn't ever be restored in the event that I restored a Macrium image. The issue you run into here is if you create new files in OneDrive, and then restore your system back to say 4 days ago, OneDrive "thinks" after the restore that you deleted the files from your local machine and thus they get moved to the Recycle bin in the cloud. If you don't catch it, after a period of time they are gone.

If you use physical VHDX files your HDD / SSD is actually just 2 partitions, the EFI one and a standard NTFS one. You then create separate vhdx files on the standard (single) ntfs partition as bog standard "Virtual disk files" via disk part. Attach the vdisk, apply the windows image for each system --job done.

Your physical HDD / SSD lust looks like a standard disk with a number of vhdx files on it.

Simple, job done, multiple bootable windows installations, no need for VM's when testing real hardware.

Cheers
jimbo

The-Hive · Feb 25, 2022

I think I got a bit of room to spare...

pparks1 · Feb 25, 2022

jimbo45 said:
Simple, job done, multiple bootable windows installations, no need for VM's when testing real hardware.

Cheers
jimbo

I need VM's as I typically am testing in labs that require a handful of virtual machines to be running at the same time. For example, testing mysql or redis replication, or group policy in a Microsoft active directory domain with a few domain controllers, etc.

Most people assign far too much Disk space to the Windows system

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