My C:\ is growing even though I have FS on another volume.  I'm wondering with a SSD dive is it worth it to compress the drive and will that adversely affect FS in any way?  There will be more writes to the drive than normal and usually compression can shorten the life of a drive.  Just the same I'm wondering is anyone doing this and what are they noticing?

The argument is whether compression is better than native storage.  Give it a try but I think storage IO has never been a bottle neck.

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Edited February 14, 20224 yr by bean_sprout

You're welcome to try it.  IO may not be a bottleneck with native storage, but it might become a bottleneck with the compression overhead.

I got my compression bug out of my system back in the 90's with a program called Stacker.   Some of you may remember those programs, they were the rage for a while because dollar per megabyte costs were so high.  These days we don't have that problem.  If I need the space, I'd be money and time ahead to just get a new drive.  

It will put a load on the CPU which may be a bad idea when running a CPU limited app like MSFS.  Also be aware that compressing an SSD will use up more of the total write endurance of the SSD, however most modern SSD have a huge maximum write endurance, it is no longer the big issue it was in the early days.

Edited February 14, 20224 yr by Glenn Fitzpatrick

My suggestion would be to migrate to a larger drive. You can simply create a system image using windows backup, swap-in the new drive and restore the system image. I've done it a couple of times and it's painless. After it's done you'll never know anything changed on your system...other than you'll have more space.

This guy did a test, and concluded that unless you have a very narrow collection of file types that compress well, the benefits don't outweigh the risks, compress/decompress overhead, and a few other caveats.

https://www.hyperadvisor.net/post/what-does-compress-drive-to-save-space-actually-do-in-windows

1 hour ago, Dillon said:

My C:\ is growing even though I have FS on another volume.

If you only add MSFS stuff to your pc and your c drive is still growing though MSFS is on another drive then you may have a double installation, usually resulting from a bad re-install of MSFS

Your system disk will grow just because of archived Win10 updates even without MSFS installed.

On older installs you can recover a fair bit of drive space by deleting older update install files and windows installs:

 

How to Delete Old Windows Update Files

1. Open the Start menu, type Control Panel, and press Enter.
2. Go to Administrative Tools.
3. Double-click on Disk Cleanup.
4. Select Clean up system files.
5. Mark the checkbox next to Windows Update Cleanup.
6. If available, you can also mark the checkbox next to Previous Windows installations.

You'll have some overhead with compression that will negatively impact MSFS. Add a second SSD drive and migrate your Community and Official folders to it.

4 hours ago, somiller said:

My suggestion would be to migrate to a larger drive. You can simply create a system image using windows backup, swap-in the new drive and restore the system image. I've done it a couple of times and it's painless. After it's done you'll never know anything changed on your system...other than you'll have more space.

This guy did a test, and concluded that unless you have a very narrow collection of file types that compress well, the benefits don't outweigh the risks, compress/decompress overhead, and a few other caveats.

https://www.hyperadvisor.net/post/what-does-compress-drive-to-save-space-actually-do-in-windows

And it is basically a non risk operation. You copy you original C byte by byte and just swap them out after its finished. If something went wrong you just put back your old C drive and everthing is like it was.   After making shure the new C drive works you can alway reformat your old C and add it as extra storage.

 

most modern games store data in appdata within your user files... it will grow at times... as does the OS. As long as its not too much for your OS, no problem... I don't install things to my OS either way...

Also check your downloads folder 😄 that dumps to the OS drive automatically.

I used to run FSX on a compressed drive with no issues, but have not tried it with MSFS as my 1 TB NVME is more than sufficient at the moment.

It would be interesting to see what results users are getting in MSFS though as I'm sure my drive will fill up with addons in time.

I also wonder how much the installation will actually compress by 

Just for fun I compressed a (backup) Community folder, containing 36 GB of addons. Size: 40,969,479,058 Bytes. Size on disk: 24,250,314,752 Bytes or 100:59. I did no tests regarding loading times, performance etc.

9 hours ago, AvAngel said:

most modern games store data in appdata within your user files... it will grow at times... as does the OS. As long as its not too much for your OS, no problem... I don't install things to my OS either way...

Also check your downloads folder 😄 that dumps to the OS drive automatically.

Thanks AvAngel, love your Youtube FS reviews.  As I said above I have my FS install on another drive.  I never install anything on my C:\ volume. I moved my downloads folder to another drive off of C:\. I have three drives in my computer, C:\ (500GB) is the OS only drive, D:\ (1TB) is the FS2020 install drive, and E:\ (1TB) is for add-on backups and community folder back. Outside of C:\ I'm surprised my 1TB FS volume is filling up and so is the Data drive E:\.  When I did a reinstall of FS after the SU7 beta issue I had I found FS2020 didn't take up that much space.  The community folder had the data in it that was filling up my drive.  I can't explain the C:\ growth.

32 minutes ago, Dillon said:

Thanks AvAngel, love your Youtube FS reviews.  As I said above I have my FS install on another drive.  I never install anything on my C:\ volume. I moved my downloads folder to another drive off of C:\. I have three drives in my computer, C:\ (500GB) is the OS only drive, D:\ (1TB) is the FS2020 install drive, and E:\ (1TB) is for add-on backups and community folder back. Outside of C:\ I'm surprised my 1TB FS volume is filling up and so is the Data drive E:\.  When I did a reinstall of FS after the SU7 beta issue I had I found FS2020 didn't take up that much space.  The community folder had the data in it that was filling up my drive.  I can't explain the C:\ growth.

If it's just your C:\ that's growing, check your pagefile size, hibernation settings and old Windows updates. The latter can grow to hundreds of gigabytes in size but can be reduced with DISM.

If you want to see where the space is going, download WinDirStat and audit your drive.

Edited February 15, 20224 yr by Room112

7 hours ago, Dillon said:

I never install anything on my C:\ volume. I moved my downloads folder to another drive off of C:\. I have three drives in my computer, C:\ (500GB) is the OS only drive, D:\ (1TB) is the FS2020 install drive, and E:\ (1TB) is for add-on backups and community folder back.

If your C:\ drive is truly for OS only, it should be nowhere close to filling a 500GB drive.  On my spare/test 232GB SSD with only Windows, MSFS, and MS Office, it shows ~203 GB of usage (with 150 GB being MSFS).  So Windows, Office, and a single user profile consume about 53 GB.  Definitely nowhere near 500GB.

Things to check for:

Other gaming platforms that might install to C:, such as - Steam, Ubisoft, Epic Games, Riot Games,  See if you have content within your C drive for any such platforms.  Check folders at the top-level, as well as in Program Files and Program Files (x86).

MS Office will also install into C by default, but it still wouldn't fill 500GB.

Apple backups will also go into C by default, if you sync your iDevices using iTunes.

Do you have any music apps or video apps that download into C:?  Check especially videos as those can hog a ton of space.

Also, what folder do you download files into?  C drive?

Edited February 15, 20224 yr by mistercoffee1