Windows 10 - "Compress your OS Drive" Feature

Sephiroth720 · February 24, 2019

Hey All,

I have recently purchased myself a Dell Inspiron 15 Gaming 7567 and currently only have a 256GB M.2 SSD installed for my OS. I naturally went to the generic Windows 10 disk cleanup utility to see if there were any previous windows installations to clean up and have discovered the "Compress your OS drive" option. Can anyone recommend/advise against this option? I will soon be installing a 2nd 2.5" SATA SSD for increased storage but would like to clear any unneeded space from the OS drive at this time. This machine will be used mainly for gaming and if this compression option impacts gaming performance in any way, I will not use it.

Thanks, everyone!

Enderman · February 24, 2019

Clear space using the "free up space now" thing in the settings.

You can delete everything there no problem and free up a bunch of space.

Also look up how to disable hibernate, that gives another 8GB of space.

Don't compress the drive because it slows everything down, since reads and writes need to be compressed and then decompressed, using more CPU and ram.

You can also free up a bunch of space by clean installing windows.

Master Disaster · February 24, 2019

Following on from what Enderman said, if you compress your boot drive and something goes wrong you have very little chance of recovering anything and a much lesser chance of repairing the problem.

edit: Also WAAAAAY off topic but 47000 posts Ender? Holy shit dude

porina · February 24, 2019

If it uses NTFS filesystem compression, I found that one not to have much of a noticeable impact, but still wouldn't recommend it unless you were really desperate for free space.

Note Win10 also has a compact mode. Don't know how you activate it, but it will do some kind of compression to OS files only. It was created to allow Win10 to install on those 32GB emmc low cost laptops you see.

For general clearing of space, the Windows Disk Cleanup thing is a start, but note in recent versions it includes your download file folder. If like me you're lazy and don't move stuff you want to keep, you obviously don't want to check that option. Disabling hibernation I run "powercfg /h off" as admin. Similarly you can disable file protection or at least reduce the reserved space in Advanced system settings.