Windows 10 Eating up Disk Space

I recently upgraded to Windows 10. It's been a pretty rocky road thus far. My current issue is Windows 10 keeps using up my SSD's disk space until it has none left and then complains I have no space left. I keep my data on a separate drive, and just the OS on the SSD.

Every time I look at the drive, there is less and less space. I clear a few gigabytes of stuff so it is at 4 GB free space, then it quickly starts going back to 0. It's not temp data, so how do I figure out what is using up all this space?

Solution 1:

Most likely it's your paging file.

I would suggest creating a partition just for paging, or you can limit how much paging space you want to let Windows use by heading to Advanced Settings.

Solution 2:

I've run windows on tiny hdds before. It really depends on your setup, and some applications tend to hoard old installers. Chrome and nvidia are pretty bad about it.

windirstat is awesome for tracking down where exactly this space is going.

Shows you at a folder level, and you can drill down deeper. You can delete files directly or go to the folder with a right click and so on.

As I said. Nvidia is bad about this. Silly thing.

You can also see roughly how much space is actually the pagefile and other such things with respect to everything else you have.

This is the tool or class of tools to use when tracking down what exactly is using space.

Now, for the general debris of windows use, just run disk cleanup. Not as useful or insightful as windirstat, but pretty useful nonetheless.