Windows 7 alone taking up 35gb of my new ssd

[DeliciousCube]

So ive just built my computer and installed windows 7 ultimate 64bit the first thing i went to do is partition my harddrives , my windows drive (c) is a 120gb corsair force 3 ssd, i noticed that even though i had no programs installed 35.3 gb was allready taken up , is this normal? Also when i tried to partition my drives the most i could partition was just over 55gb was the max size available to shrink when it should be 75gb even with such a large windows file , where is the other free 25 gb which should be available to partition gone? Im really confused please explain. Essencially i want to partition 40gb for windows , and have the other around 80gb partition for commonly used programes and games. How do i do this?

BTW this computer has not yet been connected to the internet so no windows updates have been performed

 

[EndlessWaves]

I thought windows 7 was a little smaller than that (25-30GB) but the extra space may be accounted for by extras in Ultimate or the additions from service packs and other updates

I'd recommend 50-55GB for the windows partition, If a fresh install is 35GB then 40GB for long term use won't be enough unless this is a media centre, file server or other machine that will have very few new programs installed over the life of the machine.

I believe corsair follow hard drive manufacturers in using a different unit so the drive's size in windows units will be 111 or 112GB so you'll have lost some of it there.

What are you using to partition the rest of the drive? If it's windows own drive manager than it may be a new feature in windows that keeps the windows partition big enough that you won't get low space warnings from normal accumulation of data.

 

[Andy98765]

A 120gig hard drive will format to around 105 Gig. If Windows takes 35 Gig I would give it at least 60 gig to play in.

 

[DeliciousCube]

Oh that seems to make more sense now , but im still unsure why it wont let me make the windows partition any smaller than 65gb even with the 35gb file i doubt windows would want another 20gb of space to keep from me, because it does say i actually have 76.3 gb remaining to use but the maximum partition is 55gb this is not that much of a problem as i have a 1tb storage drive , i just want to make sure , my os and ssd is fine.

 

[DeliciousCube]

In my computer it says : 76.3gb free of 111gb

I like the idea of making the windows c drive 50gb so i leave it 15gb for updates and so on, allowing me to claim around 60gb of memory for my other partition but, max i can get via shrink is 56366 of the total 114370mb (exact values from drive management) is it possible that windows actually claims an aditional almost 20gb on top of the 35gb it allready took for itself. I dont mean to be sterring over a missing 5-20gb i just really want to know the reason for this.

And i just want to get this sorted and partitioned so i can start using my pc and installing stuff, thats why im mentionion the values now before absolutely anything additional has been installed.

Also do you suggest i partition my 1tb wd cavair black drive and if so into how many partitions?

 

[LJx]

I wouldn't partition the SSD myself, I don't see how it serves any purpose unless you are running another OS too

 

[DeliciousCube]

I wanted to leave the windows partition untouched after i knock of the rest so i can put everything else i plan to have on the ssd in a different partition, also i found in a different thread ''Very true, as the swap file will usually be as large as the amount of RAM you have. To anyone curious, I'd recommend not disabling it (but that is another debate for another thread someday

).'' apparently windows makes a swap file as large as the amount of ram you have , i have 16gb that would explain the missing memory

 

[twoodley]

Windows 7 seems to take a proportion of available space as a protected space, and the size of this seems to be determined by the amount of space available.
When I first installed Windows 7 on my 1TB disk it would only allow me to reduce the partition size by approx 500GB, even though over 900GB was available.
When I replaced the faulty drive I partitioned it before installing Windows into 5 x 200GB partitions. After installing Windows 7 I tried to reduce the C Drive down to 100GB but it would not release the space. Not sure why it does this, but it happens.
With only 120GB total space I would not bother with partitioning personally, as this is a very manageable space.

 

[PAH]

apparently windows makes a swap file as large as the amount of ram you have , i have 16gb that would explain the missing memory

Yep. I too have 16gb ram but have set a custom paging file size of 128mb (after seeing the recommendations to not set it to zero).

I've got Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit installed on a 60gb SSD (55.7GB once formatted to NTFS), currently shows 17gb used and that's with a few bits of software installed (probably under 1gb worth).

To check where the space has gone I've used Extensoft Free Disk Analyzer in the past, which gives you a breakdown by folder. Very handy for identifying what is hogging drive space.

 

[Habanos]

The hiberfile for S4 Hibernate and Hybrid Sleep will use up almost as much RAM as you have in your system (I think it's compressed to around 75% by default though).

If you have installed Service Pack 1, you can enter disk cleanup and delete the backup files for that. I believe that's half a GB.

System restore checkpoint/shadow copies will slowly use of free space (although that space will become available if needed).