Thinkpads Forum

Greetings everyone... It has been a pleasure reading up fellow t60 posts... I was wondering whether anyone has problems with hard disk space. I thought 60GB would be sufficient considering the only real large application I have installed would be office professional. But for some reason it seems that I only have 6GB of space left. Yes I do have music files but totalling only 5GB~... but seriously what's gobbling up the space? Any suggestions?

tockki wrote:Greetings everyone... It has been a pleasure reading up fellow t60 posts... I was wondering whether anyone has problems with hard disk space. I thought 60GB would be sufficient considering the only real large application I have installed would be office professional. But for some reason it seems that I only have 6GB of space left. Yes I do have music files but totalling only 5GB~... but seriously what's gobbling up the space? Any suggestions?

60 gb is really 54 gb, for starters, as disk mfrs calculate gb differently than do operating systems. You also have a service partition that is likely around 4 or maybe 5 gb, that's hidden. That leaves you with maybe 49gb at the start. Then, if you use Rescue and Recovery and have made backups, that could easily swallow another 5-10gb (maybe more if your hard disk is loaded up with data, music files, programs, and other stuff).

Hard drives need "headroom" in order to function efficiently and in order to be effectively defragmented. If my calculations are correct, you don't have enough headroom and unless you delete some things your hard disk is going to slow you down.

Newegg has recently been selling the 7k100 Hitachi SATA 100gb drive for ~121 delivered (haven't checked this week but there has recently been an automatic immediate $15 coupon on this item). You should seriously consider an upgrade. You could buy an ultrabay SATA hard disk drive tray ~$40-45 if you don't use your optical drive all the time and end up with two drives in your system for more space.

Has Away Manager been running any backups for you that you're not aware of? They can pile up quickly and consume beau coup space.

I wish I bought the 100GB from the beginning... Darn it. I thought considering Lenovo was selling 40 GB as a base model, 60GB would be sufficient... Oh well... But the Ultrabay HD sounds like a good option.

About the backups... there are three seen. Hopefully that will free up some space. Trying to find out how to erase those backups but still searching...

Thanks for the suggestions... open for more though..

The backups were the culprit!!!! Thanks guys!!! It freed up 13GB!!! This forum is the best..

Windows restore eats up space too - see whether you have that turned on or off.

The best utility EVER for seeing what's taking hard drive space:

http://www.win.tue.nl/sequoiaview/

and it's free!