Keeps going up and down and I haven't installed much. After I installed 7 it was around 60GB used then dropped to about 40gb now back up to 80gb. Why is it fluctuating so much? Is there a setting I haven't changed?

might be something to do with trim

Not sure. It's a Samsung 830 128gb SSD. Pretty sure it's TRIM enabled and is still quick. It's not slowing at all just don't understand why it's changing

I have that drive, only ever changes when I add or remove items.

Dont have a swap file on it do you?

A what?

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2232456

Should help you decide

It's tempory storage for when you run out of ram, hint ....... you can put it on the starage drive, should it ever need to be used, which I doubt it with 16gb

A Swap file or "virtual memory", its allocated under advanced system properties, there shouldnt be one set on an SSD.

Other than that I wonder if its system restore points or something creating log files.

Oh a paging file I know. Haven't had to bother with one of those for years. So I can turn it off completely then if I have SSD?

The page file is a fixed size so wont account for the space changing - if it does have to change a little warning triangle would pop up. i also reccomend you DONT turn it off - even if you have a gazillion GB of ram, you may find windows acts a bit odd if its turned off completely.

If you have an "old skool" spinning drive, you can move the page file off the SSD without impact

Your issue is more likely to be shadow-copy/previous versions which can fluctuate in size depending on usage patterns. youll find the settings on the system protection tab on advanced system properties. And you can turn this off for the SSD if you dont require it.. Personally i have it turned off for the SSD and on for everything else - but then my system is quite well organised and i dont store any "important" stuff on the SSD.

i dont store any "important" stuff on the SSD.

Porn?

At the moment I just have the SSD and everything is on external drives. I will be getting a secondary internal drive when I get chance to. The only other thing I can think of is I have a few things downloading but not complete yet. Is it simply reserving the space for them even though they aren't there yet? Haven't noticed before

At the moment I just have the SSD and everything is on external drives. I will be getting a secondary internal drive when I get chance to. The only other thing I can think of is I have a few things downloading but not complete yet. Is it simply reserving the space for them even though they aren't there yet? Haven't noticed before

Potentially reserving space.... yes depending what app is downloading it - Torrents allocate the full file size straight away. and if you are downloading stuff and then moving it off the C: this will balloon the previous versions cache..

when im d/ling stuff it goes straight to the mech drive, might be best to make sure temp and complete files are to a mechanical drive only

That's the plan eventually. SSD for OS and all software then data elsewhere