Size Puzzle

Here's the top end of my SSD's Win 10 drive as displayed in Treesize Free. Can anyone offer a possible explanation for the huge difference of over 14GB between the Size and Allocated columns for the C drive as a whole? None of the other computer drives here has this situation, Size and Allocated being close in every case. As the pic shows this effect is spread throughout the drive - present for most folders.

 

If you don't have Rollback Rx installed on the other computers, I believe Rollback Rx is the reason. I don't exactly know how it handles snapshots.

 

This situation was there before Rollback was installed mdonah. My concern with it is that it may affect TRIM's ability to ensure even wear across the drive and I was reminded to look at it when reading up on how Rollback performs its magic, because the way Rollback protects sectors that are used in any snapshot can also affect TRIM. From my scant knowledge of how SSDs store data I think the only fix might be a complete disk format and reinstall, but I ain't going down that road! I'm just hoping that someone who does understand this stuff might happen across this thread.

 

Size = uncompressed or sparse file size total, Allocated = actual space used, with certain (coloured) files/folders compressed. Yours does look extreme, Windows is probably using a compressed image (or w/e their term. is) because the drive is small, and/or, the PC can handle de/recompression on the fly without too big a hit.

 

Interesting thought satrow but no compressed files/folders here. The system was built by PCSpecialist with Win 7 Pro x64 and I upgraded it to Win 10. It has a 120GB SSD for the OS and a fast WD spinner for everything else. Goes like stink. I do have an image of the SSD when I first had the machine and it might be worth temporarily restoring it to see what the state of it was then.

 

If there are no Compressed folders, why are the folders differentiated by colour, as mine are - I know I don't have a compressed OS?




compact /compactos:query

^ Run it from an Admin Cmd window

 

You're gonna have to explain this to me as yours looks the same but you say yours is not compacted
-

 

Yup, yours is a Compact OS, it's much more compressed than mine, which is almost at default compression levels (I might have compressed one or two small folders).

How does mine look the same, the clues (coloured) are there?

 

It's just this statement that confuses me but no sweat as you have opened a door I never knew even existed and you have also answered my original question. I hate having things on my computer I can't understand and this was a biggie. Thank you

 

Well, my rig is on W7 again now but when I was testing W10, I checked whether it was compressed or not, the result was negative and the TreeSize Free picture looked very similar to the way it does here. I have 3x 250GB SSDs plus 2x spinners.

I suspect yours was compressed because during the upgrade, the SSD free space would have dropped into the ballpark where Setup would have checked for compression/decompression speed and then installed Windows compressed. If you still have plenty of space, ~25% + 15GB, you might want to remove the compression, the PC should work a little better but whether you'd feel the difference, I really don't know, much depends on your normal workflow and the full spec. of the rig.

 

Well, as I have this whizzbang snapshot capability now, and plenty of spare space I think I'll try that. Googling the compact command isn't helping much as the hits all refer to file compression as it used to be, but this is clearly something rather different. Can you help with the command syntax to remove the compaction? I may run into permission issues I suspect but I'd like to try it.

 

I can't test it out but here's the basics for Compact.exe: https://technet.microsoft.com/library/Cc726045.aspx

EDIT: looks like
/u /s[:<Dir>]is what you need - Windows +subfolders would be the target?

 

Yeah, that's the page I was looking at but felt there was probably something else as none of the folders in /Windows have the compression flag set. Also, it doesn't say applies to W10.

 

Taking a break for an hour before lighting the blue touch paper

 

No, they wouldn't show that anyway, the compact is set during installation so it's the default (at least, that's my rough explanation).

Introduced with 8,1? and is included by W10, perhaps there's no more recent page but I'm pretty sure there's an MS blog post about it (some of the MS portable devices, Surfaces?, would be stuck upgrading, if it wasn't for Compact OS - though maybe some will be stuck in the future... ).

 

compact /compactos:never has fixed it and My C drive now looks a heck of a lot more normal -



I didn't think I had any chance of fixing this so thanks a bunch satrow Now just need to see what effect it may have.

 

This is the correct equivalent picture -

 

Ah yes, I do recall seeing that when I was checking it out originally.

No worries, pleased to be of some help - but I almost didn't look into this topic... mdonah replying to Earthling? No need for me there

 

It's a nice example of there always being more to learn, no matter how long you've been at it.

 

Wow! Power button to working desktop less than 15 seconds. It felt quite good before but this is nice!

 

Thanks Earthling and satrow. This may help explain the sluggishness of my Inspiron compared to my Latitude. But, the OSes on my Inspiron have 250 GB each and on my Latitude, 167 GB each. Both have Samsung 850 EVOs. I have no spinners except externals.

 

It's not very often that system changes have really noticeable effects on speed/responsiveness, but this one really has. Worth checking that any system that has been upgraded to W10 has not ended up with a compressed OS as mine did.

compact /compactos:query from an elevated command prompt