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I have a Kingston A400 128Gb SSD as the boot drive. It's almost brand new. And for a while, I had had a problem of runaway drive usage by an unidentified source and the drive would be permanently out of space .... until today.... after I selected all folders and checked the total disk space consumed using Properties dialogue in the Context Menu, and after the tabulation completed, ~55Gb space became available.

What are the possible causes behind SSDs displaying less available space than there actually is? What could the tabulation have triggered in releasing the space? And can I trust the space to be truly available -- is there a way to verify?

To be clear, memory paging is turned off for that drive; out of this list, I can confirm none of hidden files, system folders, recycle bin, system backup, file compression are relevant in my situation. I have no way to check the space indexing used to take or fragmentation used to cause. The folders combined does not display significantly more or less space on drive as of now.

Argyll
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  • `selected all folders` in Explorer for calculating the used space does not work on Windows 7 because of soft-links, and other NTFS special features. Use the disk property dialog for a real free/used calculation. – Robert Mar 31 '20 at 11:56
  • @Robert: What is the "disk property dialog"? – Argyll Mar 31 '20 at 12:46
  • The is the entry `Properties` in the context menu of a disk item in the Windows Explorer. – Robert Mar 31 '20 at 15:00
  • @Robert: That was where I got the tally. I didn't know Explorer has an option to display multiple selection folder size outside context menu (is there?). I'll edit the question to be clear. – Argyll Mar 31 '20 at 18:18
  • Do you see the folder SystemVolumeInformation in the root of each drive? It can contains multiple GB of data used by the system restore points. If you don't see this folder plus the content inside you are missing a large data part. I would assume that this is what is missing your calculation. – Robert Mar 31 '20 at 19:35
  • I suggest running [TreeSize Free](https://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free) as an administrator(!) to find out what’s using space. This certainly isn’t about SSDs specifically. – Daniel B Mar 31 '20 at 20:25
  • @Robert: System restore is turned off on that PC. The calculation was and is done automatically by the OS. To be clear, this is a case where the harddrive had been reported full by the OS -- blocking software write to drive for weeks. And upon a tally in the Properties dialogue, half of the total SSD capacity was released. – Argyll Apr 01 '20 at 14:07
  • @DanielB: Thank you for the pointer. I'll keep it in mind. For this case though, the harddrive had been reported full by the OS -- blocking software write to drive for weeks. And upon a tally in the Properties dialogue, half of the total SSD capacity was released. Does checking folder size with an external software actually tell us about the cause behind the phenomenon? – Argyll Apr 01 '20 at 14:10
  • This is not a “phenomenon”. It is simply not that easy to select and access _everything_ in Explorer, with system hidden files, user rights and whatnot. – Daniel B Apr 04 '20 at 12:50
  • @DanielB: What other word would you like to use instead? Like I said, half of the drive was literally released and made available by tallying the size of everything Explorer shows. What is the relevance of Explorer not being able to tally things its GUI does not show? – Argyll Apr 04 '20 at 14:31

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