Question SSD insufficient free space with 100GB free

[emitfudd]

The last few days my pc has been freezing up simply surfing the web. I opened Samsung Magician and my C drive 960 EVO 500GB says insufficient free space. It is at 353 of 464 GB. Hardly seems full. I deleted a few Steam games but realized they were installed on the D drive so that didn't help at all. I looked at all my installed programs on C drive and everything is less than 1GB so there isn't any one or two programs I can move to D drive to make a significant difference. What are my options here? I don't want to replace this drive with a larger one. Seems like there should be some way to utilize that 100 GB of free space.

Windows 10 22H2 fully updated
Samsung 960 EVO 500 GB x 2
Drive C 353/464 GB
Drive D 211/464 GB
Latest Samsung Magician version and latest firmware installed

 

[USAFRet]

Install and run either WinDirStat, or WizTree.

Run as Administrator, selecting only the drive in question.
Post a screencap here.

Also, a screencap of your Disk Management window.

 

[emitfudd]

Install and run either WinDirStat, or WizTree.

Run as Administrator, selecting only the drive in question.
Post a screencap here.

Also, a screencap of your Disk Management window.

I have the screenshots for disk management and wiztree on my desktop but I can't post them in a reply. I can copy and paste them and I can see them in my reply but then the reply is blank.

 

[USAFRet]

I have the screenshots for disk management and wiztree on my desktop but I can't post them in a reply. I can copy and paste them and I can see them in my reply but then the reply is blank.

Upload your pics to imgur.com, post the link(s) here

 

[emitfudd]

Upload your pics to imgur.com, post the link(s) here

https://imgur.com/QXA7Cur

View: https://imgur.com/QXA7Cur

https://imgur.com/EMQsBLv

View: https://imgur.com/EMQsBLv

 

[USAFRet]

WizTree and DM seem to agree on the space used and free.

Do you have a screencap of Samsung Magician telling you "insufficient free space " ?

 

[emitfudd]

WizTree and DM seem to agree on the space used and free.

Do you have a screencap of Samsung Magician telling you "insufficient free space " ?

https://imgur.com/hyMjooo

View: https://imgur.com/hyMjooo

 

[USAFRet]

Did you click the Disk Cleanup button?

 

[hotaru.hino]

I suggest the following:

• Look at the SMART stats using CrystalDiskInfo and see if anything looks suspicious. You'd have to compare the stats to the fields in this table
• Issue an SSD optimization command from Windows by opening the Start menu, type in "optimize drives" in the search bar, and use the tool from there. This basically forces a TRIM command. You should leave the computer alone for a few minutes to let the SSD do its thing, then see if there's still issues.

 

[emitfudd]

Did you click the Disk Cleanup button?

It says disk cleanup failed. I also tried disk cleanup by clicking on the C drive from the desktop and there is just a few hundred MB that can be cleaned up in temp files.

 

[emitfudd]

I suggest the following:

• Look at the SMART stats using CrystalDiskInfo and see if anything looks suspicious. You'd have to compare the stats to the fields in this table
• Issue an SSD optimization command from Windows by opening the Start menu, type in "optimize drives" in the search bar, and use the tool from there. This basically forces a TRIM command. You should leave the computer alone for a few minutes to let the SSD do its thing, then see if there's still issues.

I can check SMART status with Magician. Everything had a blue circle next to it indicating normal. I tried the optimize drives. It said it had last been completed 13 days ago. I ran it again and Magician still shows the same message.

 

[hotaru.hino]

I can check SMART status with Magician. Everything had a blue circle next to it indicating normal. I tried the optimize drives. It said it had last been completed 13 days ago. I ran it again and Magician still shows the same message.

So this indicates to me either the Samsung Magician software is bugged or the drive is bugged.

I would say the next thing to try is simply stuff the SSD with files until maybe about 20GB is free and observe the behavior then. If the system starts choking long before it gets there, the SSD is hosed.

 

[emitfudd]

I deleted Assassin's Creed Odyssey which according to Wiztree was taking up 99GB of space. Now I have 216 GB free and the insufficient free space message is gone.

It's bad enough that you only get 464GB of usable space on a 500GB SSD but then it isn't happy when you get down to around 100GB of free space.

I will see if the freezing issue persists or if this takes care of it. Thanks for the help!

Just when I tried to post this reply, the reply button was unresponsive. When it became responsive again, it posted my reply 4 times. LOL. I deleted the duplicates. I have run a scan with Malwarebytes and it came back clean.

 

[emitfudd]

I opened task manager and it said power usage for Firefox was very high. Then I found 4 more instances of Firefox running under background processes. I closed them. I just went back into task manager and now it shows 7 instances of Firefox running in background processes. Power usage has come back down to low.

I checked my newer gaming PC and it is running the same version of Windows and same version of Firefox and it has not had the freezing issue.

I tried running 4 videos at the same time with Windows Media Player and it did not freeze or even slow down.

The last time I experienced an issue like this was 10 years ago and it ended up being a dying HDD.

I just read that Firefox 111.0.1 had an issue with freezing but it stated that has been fixed. Not the same issue I have as it says Firefox would just present a blank window. My home page loads up normally but I suspect the problem could be this version of FF although my other PC is fine.