I seem to have just made a ton of space on my hard drive & not sure how?

B0bbyEwing

Newcad said:

The Operating System needs a certain amount of disk space free to work at it's best.

The general rules of thumb are between 15%-20% free on a HDD and 10%-15% on SSD.

You will find some that say you should leave more free space on a SSD, but that is generally for older models. Most manufacturers now include some 'overprovisioning' (ie. Some 'hidden' extra free space that you can't see, can't access yourself, and is only used when the drive itself needs it).

More info: https://www.partitionwizard.com/partitionmanager/how-much-free-space-should-you-leave-on-a-pc.html

Thanks. The drive in question, just for info, is a Samsung 860 EVO 1TB.

Samsung Magician says 22.1TB written. 

Newcad

The biggest advice is "Backup your files".

Either to another drive (or two, or 3),  or to the cloud, or do both.

The more backups you make the better, preferably including at least one that is not kept at your home.

Storage Drives do die unexpectedly. And fires, floods, etc. happen. And Malware/Ransomeware happens.

Whether you make just a backup of your own files  or a full "image" of your computer depends on which risk you are protecting against.

If you have backups then you are not going to be devastated by losing important files and photos if anything unexpected happens to your computer.

Sicard

You can tell which files are big by running disc cleanup. I just gained about 4gb by deleting windows update remnants (which would auto delete in about a week or so).

bob2302

Newcad said:

You will find some that say you should leave more free space on a SSD, but that is generally for older models. Most manufacturers now include some 'overprovisioning' (ie. Some 'hidden' extra free space that you can't see, can't access yourself, and is only used when the drive itself needs it).

They have always had this. They have better wear levelling these days, so the amount is less important.