How to trim a drive to minimum?

ssal

Active Member
I have a 500gb SSD C: drive that holds the OS and program. A separate D drive is to hold the data.

Overtime, the C: drive is over half used. I have a similar set up with another laptop and the C: drive is taking up only 125 gb.

I want to trim my C: drive to similar size as my other machine. That is, I want to put a 250 gb SSD in it and use the 500 gb for something else.

How can I trim my C: drive safely without causing any problem?

I use Photoshop and Adobe Premiere Pro mostly these days.

Thanks.
 

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
So... you're wanting to add a new smaller drive and duplicate what's on the larger drive (and reduce it's size to fit) so you can clone it to the newer smaller one? Just making sure I'm understanding what you're after.
 

ssal

Active Member
So... you're wanting to add a new smaller drive and duplicate what's on the larger drive (and reduce it's size to fit) so you can clone it to the newer smaller one? Just making sure I'm understanding what you're after.
Yes. That's exactly what I want to do. Replacing the 500gb SSD with a 250gb.
 

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
If it were me, I'd use Macrium Reflect. Pull off whatever you need to on the drive to make it at least 10 percent less than full capacity of the new smaller drive, so shoot for like 200-215GB used max. Preferably less. Once you've got enough stuff cleared off/moved you can use disk management in windows to shrink the partition to a little less than full and smaller than the new drive.

Macrium will let you create an image of the drive, make sure you get the recovery partitions with it, and it usually can dynamically change partition size to fit a new disk. There's likely a few quirks depending on your setup but that should at least give you a direction to head. Once you've restored the image to the new drive you can expand the partition to totally fill it.
 

ssal

Active Member
The Disk Clean up only trim out the minimum and let me regain about 5gb of space.

I did an in-depth analysis of what take up the space and found that the major culprit was Apple MobileSyn which stored the backup information of all the iPhones and iPads I have ever owned. That's about 70 gb. Then appdata of a few previous version of Adobe Photoshop and Bridge took up another 30 gb. In all, I was able to clean up another 100 gb of unused data.
 

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
WinDirStat might be a useful program for you. Make sure to run as admin when you use it tho.
 

JaredDM

Active Member
It's $20, but I've used this program enough times to pay for itself over and over: https://www.paragon-software.com/landing-pages/migrate-OS-to-SSD

It'll properly migrate all data, allow excluding folders you don't want to copy, and get it all bootable and ready. It does all the partition resizing on the fly too, so you don't have to worry about something going awry during resizing in preparation to clone. And, you can run the program right on the laptop or computer you're cloning to the new SSD.

There are certainly free methods, but for $20 it'll save you a lot of time.
 

ssal

Active Member
It's $20, but I've used this program enough times to pay for itself over and over: https://www.paragon-software.com/landing-pages/migrate-OS-to-SSD

It'll properly migrate all data, allow excluding folders you don't want to copy, and get it all bootable and ready. It does all the partition resizing on the fly too, so you don't have to worry about something going awry during resizing in preparation to clone. And, you can run the program right on the laptop or computer you're cloning to the new SSD.

There are certainly free methods, but for $20 it'll save you a lot of time.
I use Macrium free version. It works for me. You have the option to change the size of the partition before you restore the image of the larger drive.
 

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
It's $20, but I've used this program enough times to pay for itself over and over: https://www.paragon-software.com/landing-pages/migrate-OS-to-SSD

It'll properly migrate all data, allow excluding folders you don't want to copy, and get it all bootable and ready. It does all the partition resizing on the fly too, so you don't have to worry about something going awry during resizing in preparation to clone. And, you can run the program right on the laptop or computer you're cloning to the new SSD.

There are certainly free methods, but for $20 it'll save you a lot of time.
Man I would have happily paid 20 bucks for this a year ago. Would have helped so much at work.
 
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