I ended partitioning my drive and freed up 36GB simply by reorganizing

AI-driven reminiscence shortages have made SSDs costly, so managing your storage issues greater than ever. For years, partitioning drives was the best way to prepare, allocating house for particular functions. However, partitioning drives is counterproductive in trendy storage, provides complexity, and nonetheless doesn’t handle the primary situation: storage shortages.

While partitioning makes group simpler, it took another methods to assist me claw again 36GB of space for storing on my important drive.

Partitioning your C: drive will not make your SSD sooner

Partitions solely break up house on paper, whereas the identical NAND sits beneath

The concept of partitioning drives has turn out to be considerably outdated on trendy PCs for a number of causes. First, it will not enhance efficiency as a result of SSDs haven’t any transferring elements, and your OS will not magically get a sooner portion of the NAND.

Compared to HDDs, SSDs want further free blocks for put on leveling and rubbish assortment, and partitioning will not create a separate bodily space of free storage.

Secondly, storage administration turns into one other situation as a result of your partition the place you are holding Windows 11 may replenish shortly whereas the opposite partition stays empty.

My 256GB C: drive stored filling up regardless of simply Windows 11 and a few apps on the drive

Windows.previous, a hibernation file, and downloads left 13.4GB free out of 237GB

Credit: Shaheer Khan/MUO

Windows 11 necessities state a minimal of 64GB of storage, however that is hardly true as a result of bloatware, drivers, cache, leftover updates, and different elements can inflate the OS dimension far past that.

I solely have Windows 11 and some apps on my C: drive, which is my solely partition on my 256GB SSD, but it nonetheless fills up despite the fact that I maintain my important content material, like media and video video games, on my secondary drives.

The cause is that junk retains accumulating on Windows 11 regardless of regular maintenance tasks by Storage Sense and replace cleanup. Windows 11 tends to dump all the pieces onto the primary drive, whether or not it is downloads, updates, paperwork, and extra.

Currently, my C: drive solely has 13.4GB free out of 237GB whole usable house, which is alarming.

Upon inspection, I discovered that the primary culprits had been put in software program, Windows.previous from the final replace, the hibernation file, leftover replace knowledge, and the Downloads folder. To be truthful, there is no cause downloaded content material ought to be dumped on the C: drive when I’ve loads of free storage on my different drives.

Clearing the junk Windows left behind

Turning off hibernation and deleting the previous Windows set up recovered the remaining

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Beyond reorganizing your drive, you might also have loads of gathered junk hogging storage. By going to Settings > Storage, I discovered the precise house hogs.

After that, my cleansing process began by disabling hibernation and Fast Startup, which resulted in me liberating practically 4GB of information. You can accomplish that by opening PowerShell as an Administrator and typing on this command: powercfg /h off.

Then I discovered one other Windows set up on my C: drive. Now I’ve no use for the previous Windows set up, and it is simply taking over pointless house. To take away it, go to Settings → System → Storage → Temporary Files → Cleanup system information.

While this solely cleaned up junk information that had been ineffective and hogging storage, the true step was transferring content material from C: to different drives.

How I reorganized the place Windows retains its knowledge

Moving downloads and new content material off C:

My recommendation to each Windows consumer is to grasp the place every kind of information ought to be stored, and I do not advocate holding something however the OS and software program on the drive the place the OS is put in.

I need to additionally acknowledge that I’m in a distinct place to some of us, as I’ve a PC with a number of different storage drives put in. That means I’ve the choice of shifting storage round. It’s not far off to have an exterior storage drive, thoughts you; having further storage is not unique, even when it is dearer nowadays.

I began by transferring all the Downloads folder to my secondary SSD and altered the situation in my browser too. Then, I modified all of the settings inside Windows 11 to “Choose the place new content material is saved” for my D: drive beneath Storage in Settings. Now, each new screenshot, media, and doc saves to D:.

Aside from these modifications, I additionally reinstalled Steam and different sport launchers to a different drive, which exists completely to retailer video games.

With these modifications and fixes, I freed up practically 36GB of house, and the drive is not in a cautious state the place SSD efficiency drops and the system may turn out to be unstable.

How a lot free house your SSD really wants

For an SSD to work most effectively, maintain no less than 30% of the drive free, so it has sufficient house for put on leveling and rubbish assortment; that is the brink for optimum efficiency. Below that, the SSD could begin to throttle efficiency as a result of it has no blocks obtainable, decreasing write efficiency.

In addition to reorganizing the content material and cleansing your C: drive, it’s also possible to uninstall apps you do not want, together with each third-party and Microsoft-included Windows 11 apps.

Storage capability

1TB

Hardware Interface

PCIe 5.0 x4

Brand

Crucial

Transfer charge

12,400 MB/s learn/11,800 MB/s write

TBW

2400 TBW

Warranty

5 years

The Crucial T700 is a high-end PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD designed for excessive efficiency, delivering ultra-fast knowledge switch speeds for gaming, content material creation, and demanding workloads. Available with an optionally available heatsink, it maximizes sustained efficiency and helps Microsoft DirectStorage, making it excellent for next-generation PCs and high-speed storage upgrades.