Can my C:\ drive being almost full (7,71gb free) cause laggs / stutters?

[Allptraum1989]

it is an ssd which is why its so small (128gb)

I have a fairly nice system.

Gtx 970 oc,

ry 1600x,

sadly - only 8gb ram (waiting for price drops)

a 3tb storage hdd and a 250gb nvme ssd for games and programs

and of course my 128gb nand ssd boot drive

 

i'm running games at 3840x2160 with a constant 40fps, in WoW at least, but every other minute i get a maybe 1/10sec stutter. Not only in games but in generel. Even while browing folders or the internet. Sometimes it happens every few seconds for a minute or so...

[Skiiwee29]

since your boot drive is an SSD, there is no performance hit for having it at or near maxiumum capacity. That only affects mechanical hard drives. 

[Spotty]

More likely RAM limitations.
Check task manager to see how much RAM is in use while you're playing games. Alternatively, download MSI Afterburner and you can enable its on screen display to show statistics live while you are playing, such as RAM usage, CPU usage, and GPU usage.

 

Why do you have the 250GB nvme storage for games but the 128GB SATA SSD for your OS? If I were you I'd consider swapping them so the OS is on the 250GB NVME SSD. Warning: To do this you will need to backup all of the data on both drives and perform a fresh install of windows.

[Allptraum1989]

1 minute ago, Spotty said:

More likely RAM limitations.
Check task manager to see how much RAM is in use while you're playing games. Alternatively, download MSI Afterburner and you can enable its on screen display to show statistics live while you are playing, such as RAM usage, CPU usage, and GPU usage.

 

Why do you have the 250GB nvme storage for games but the 128GB SATA SSD for your OS? If I were you I'd consider swapping them so the OS is on the 250GB NVME SSD. Warning: To do this you will need to backup all of the data on both drives and perform a fresh install of windows.

i have considered this but i've heard from people that nvme is not really that stable when used for boot drives since it has to get initialized later on the boot process.. i don't know for sure but i've read something like this. also this would mean that it would get bloated with lots of nasty cache files or programs that DEMAND to get installed on C:\ like adobe cc of all sorts...

 

you are right.. most likely the ram since its at 85-90% all the time... well sucks. I don't really have much money as a student.. would it be a valid solution to just buy a 4gb stick? my ram setup would then by 0gb 4gb 4gb 4gb. Right now its 0gb 4gb 0gb 4gb

[homeap5]

I can't understand one thing. Is good that you have separate hard drive for programs and games, but if you have all programs installed on second SSD, then how did your system disk fill up that much? Without programs you should have lot of space, unless you have lot of files in "My Pictures", "My Music" or other folders like that.

 

And yes - SSD can slow down when is almost full, but only save process is affected, not read process. And it's still faster than HDD.

[Allptraum1989]

23 minutes ago, homeap5 said:

I can't understand one thing. Is good that you have separate hard drive for programs and games, but if you have all programs installed on second SSD, then how did your system disk fill up that much? Without programs you should have lot of space, unless you have lot of files in "My Pictures", "My Music" or other folders like that.

 

And yes - SSD can slow down when is almost full, but only save process is affected, not read process. And it's still faster than HDD.

Whenever i install a program i make sure to change it's install directory to either my hdd or my nvme. If i can't change it i move it over anyways using a junction link. However, most programs sill dump gigabytes of cache files on appdata etc... also some programs would just straight out not work when theres a juction link in their path. I am a hobby game developer and unity dumps tens of gigabytes of shader cashes on appdata, which is on c... this is how it fills up.

[porina]

On the stuttering, I'd also guess ram too more than disk capacity.

 

There are some tricks you can try to recover space on the boot drive if you want to.

 

Obviously, delete anything you don't need.

If you don't use it, disable hibernation as that will remove that file and free some GBs.

Move the swap file off C drive to the other SSD.

If you have System Restore enabled, you can reduce the allocated space to it.

The next time you do an nvidia driver update, select the "clean install" option. Note this will remove custom settings, but it will also remove old versions of the driver, which can add up to a lot of GB if it has never been cleaned.

Run the Windows Disk Clean-Up utility. Select your boot drive, then "clean system files". This will give you the option to remove redundant Windows Update files which again can save a lot of GB if not done for a while.