Hi,

My large rack mounted computer system is working without issue.

The only issue is the 250 gig SSD C drive is showing red and only has 10 more gigs of space. I am concerned the drive may be failing and if so I want to replace it. The drive is at least 8 years old. How serious an issue is this?

Thanks,

Billy

Mechanical hard drives need at least 15% free space.

I’m not positive that applies to an SSD drive but I suspect it does.

You could buy a new larger drive and clone it, or you could try a utility like WinDirStat to identify unnecessary files.

All things fail in time. There were rumors about earlier SSD's that they had a limited number of read/write cycles. I never knew that this was proven though.

As Matt mentioned, get a larger drive and clone your current one across. Most drive manufacturers have a cloning utility.

8 years+ from your current drive is probably a good time to think about a move.

Sounds like it's just full .... I replaced a Samsung SSD pro 840 2 years ago, thinking it was at fault, but it wasn't after testing it later.

Windows installers sometimes leave behind too much junk. Or the download folders get stuffed with unnecessary large video files ..... try *.* in search from within the user folder, and select size .... F

PS: Using WinDirStat, (Matt, thanks for the tip) just found some large (even over 3 GB) useless remaing files left behind from Adobe Premiere in C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Common\Media Cache Files. Never knew it was all there eating up costly SSD space.

Yes, the red just means limited free space available. I get that all the time !!

Try a disk clean-up, it may liberate some junk/temp files you don't need anymore.

Thanks guys,

I think the only thing I had not tried was WinDirStat. Thanks Matt

Bottom line, I got the drive back in the blue so I assume there is perhaps nothing wrong with the drive. I found 10 gigs of video I was unaware I had. I made a copy of the complete list of software on the machine and put it on the backup drive.

I also have been told that SSD drives have a limited life cycle. True or not I have no idea other than everything fails at some point. That was part of what was concerning me.

Actually the next step is to build a new machine. I have gotten about 10 years out of this one with a couple of rebuilds, new motherboard and so on. So, I really feel pretty good about how well it has survived.

I just don't quite know what to build next or how far to go i9?? thunderbolt?? Putting together a really high quality computer is not cheep and never has been.

At times windows irritates me to the point I have considered going to a Mac. I just don't have any real experience with Apple's stuff. I don't think there is as much advantage today as there use to be.

Anyway, thanks for all the feed back

Billy

I had an interesting problem the other day with my C: drive. It was reporting only 15 GB free (it's a 465 GB partition) and, due to low free space, it was coloured red like in Videotrack's image above.

The problem was that I knew that there should have been plenty of free space available on the drive, though.

After a bit of research on the net, I discovered that the problem was due to my Windows 7 being overly enthusiastic in assigning space to system protection.

Following internet advice from multiple sources, I modified this Windows setting to around 10% and restarted my computer. Now I have 298 GB free (as opposed to the 15 GB when Windows had control).

The moral of the story... if your SSD is your boot drive, have a look at System Protection and see if forcing it to be 10% rather than leaving it under Windows control helps increase space.

The above said, an 8 years old disk drive would statistically be flirting with potential failure. While I use older drives for storage, I always make sure they're backed up.

Regards,
Noel

Sounds like the bushman talking about his axe: "It's had 3 new heads and 4 new handles and it still going strong!"

(Sorry, I digress)

Back on topic: If you're building a new machine, just go for the best you can reasonably afford, and what you know will cut it for you.

Next month there'll be a faster processor, cheaper RAM and a bigger drive, and the price you paid for your CPU will fall. That's the nature of the business these days.

If your Windows.old is still sitting on the drive you can get shy of that using windows disk cleanup. Windows.old can take up to 20gig and if you are satisfied with your current Windows install should be safe to remove. Windows.old is created with major updates.

Also SSD drive prices have falling drastically recently. So replacing with a larger one could be done quite cheaply now I would think.

Yes it is true that SSDs have a limited number of read/write cycles per cell. But with latest OS providing TRIM features for SSD drives which distributes the data around the drives more evenly to stop overwriting individual cells so often they are a lot longer lasting than originally thought. The specs for a new drive now states:

"250GB drive: 100TB Total Bytes Written (TBW), equal to 54GB per day for 5 years"

Thanks Noel, that in fact was part of the issue. I think I have the drive issue under control at the moment until it actually fails.

I back up important stuff. If it is really important, I burn it to CD. Having said that I had a USB backup drive fail and become unreadable. It had a very large amount of midi files that I used from time to time. Being the oldest backup drive I am not sure just what was on it...lol

The windows version on my machine is 1803 installed on 5/13/2018. There was another update that came out in October 2018, version 1809. I am not sure there is any current reason to install that update.

Cleaning up the C drive did improve the speed at which things happen. I have another desk top computer I am duplicating most everything on to use as a backup if this one fails. It is not as powerful but will run everything until I can build a new one.

Cheers,

Billy

There's another good one; same purpose, different implementation (less graphical): TreeSize

DON'T, unless U R looking for trouble ....

Matt,

Thank you for WinDirStat, that's a really useful piece of software! Very much appreciated.

Regards,
Noel