Gitchigumi Loc: Wake Forest, NC

Thanks... looks like that may be the option I'm headed toward.

Bayou

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Everyone has their own personal preference on how to lay out their storage. Personally, I wouldn’t consider using anything as small for my C: drive as 128GB - not in 2023 when you can buy a VERY fast 500GB drive for $60. I just find it’s just so much easier to keep windows and applications (and application data files) on C: and user data and documents on a separate drive or drives. It also makes backup easy, but as I said everyone has their own preferences and reasons.

Now the real question is what type of drive is the 128GB C: drive and the other SSDs? Are they SATA connected, M.2 SATA or m.2 NVME? Why? Because you want Windows, applications and scratch space on the fastest drive, and the best situation is that to be an m.2 NVME SSD (by over an order of magnitude speed difference over a SATA or m.2 SATA SSD), but that will be determined by what interface/drive slots you have on you MB. More information please…

cahale Loc: San Angelo, TX

If you have other drives, you can assign Adobe scratch space to them so as to move work there. Additionally, if you do have more drives, put everything but your program files on them to free up more space. Just be sure everything is backed up - preferably twice.

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

Great point. Our OP should review their Camera RAW Cache Setting (LR Edit / Preferences / File Handling). For performance, I have mine set to a max 20GB. It resides on my single 1TB C drive. Our OP probably wants to assure this file exists on their larger drives, not C. Could be an easy fix to their C space problems?

bz178g

I used an extra SSD to create a "scratch disk" where Photoshop does much of its work. Having it separate from the drive where the app is installed speeds the process considerably.

Gitchigumi Loc: Wake Forest, NC

Hmmm.... you might be onto something there... my Camera RAW Cache is directed to the C: drive. See the screenshot below.

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

For a 128GB C-drive, that configuration will be a problem. See the PS comment above and try to determine where that PS setting resides too. Update both to place the file \ folders off the C drive. And then, purge the old folder of the C: drive.

chrissybabe Loc: New Zealand

For a new computer where the user is using Adobe software 512Gb is the minimum size for a C: drive. My wifes PC is using about 300GB of that 512GB and she is a heavy user. A none Adobe user could get away with 256GB but for the price difference why not 512GB as well. If on any laptop automatically replace any sized C: drive with 1TB (or 2TB if you can find one) - you will not regret this later. At least on a PC, if you use any form of imaging backup programs, then do not go over 512GB as it will take forever to make an image and storing multiple of these can also take up a lot of room.

PHRubin Loc: Nashville TN USA

I have found that in my case, my data takes up the bulk of disk drive space (or SSD space). I am considering installing a large hard drive and moving ALL DATA to it. If your C: drive has much data, you can move it and then tell the programs where the data went.

Or, as suggested above, clone the C: onto a much larger drive MAKING SURE YOU have relocated data from it before doing so.

NCMtnMan Loc: N. Fork New River, Ashe Co., NC

If you can see that you actually have two physical drives, then it is most likely that one of the drives is partitioned into two logical drives. Most likely C: and D: with E: being the second physical drive or it could be that the partitioned drives could be C: and E: depending on how the system was set up. In either case, you can go to Control Panel (assuming this is a Windows system), the select Administrative Tools, Computer Management and then look for Disk Management. This screen will show you the physical drives in your system and the partitions on them. If your C: drive is a partition along with a larger partition D: or E: on that drive, then there is another option available. You can actually shrink or expand partitions on a physical drive. So let's say your drive is actually a 1TB SSD drive with a 200GB C: partition and the other 800GB partition is either drive D: or E:. And, the drive D: or E: only has 100GB of space used. You could shrink that drive down to say 200 or 300GB which would leave 500 or 600GB of unclaimed space. You could then expand your drive C: to collect that free space so that you would end up with a drive C: with a total of 700 to 800GB. However, you should perform a complete image backup of that physical drive before attempting to do this or anything else that has been recommended on this blog. That can be best performed by connecting an external drive to your system and using the Backup application contained in Control Panel that comes with Windows. It is a fairly simple process. You just want to have either the original Windows operating system disk and a DVD-RW drive with a writeable blank disk or an USB drive that the system can use to create a boot disk from as part of the backup process to be used for installing the image should it be needed. I spent 30 plus years building systems, networks and repairs and troubleshooting them, and I have always recommended this type of backup for everyone to perform at least monthly. This type of backup is what is part of a drive cloning process as well. It allows you to restore a drive back to where it was when the image was created without having to reinstall anything. I actually perform one monthly and then perform a data cloud backup daily automatically. That way if a drive gets infected or dies, I can put a new drive in and restore the image and then restore my data from the cloud and lose nothing but some time. Hope this helps.

Gitchigumi Loc: Wake Forest, NC

Thanks! And, yes, your comment is very helpful!

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Your points are well taken. Before any of us can give good advice, we need to know exactly what the OP has which can be found as you say in disk management. And while in control panel, he can go to device manager and choose disk drives which will show the exact manufacturer, model number and size of each drive. Armed with that information (the OP can take screen shots), we can offer accurate recommendations. No point in moving applications, data and scratch disks around without understanding which are the fastest drives. This isn’t just a space issue on his C: drive, you want to configure the system to use the fastest drives for the tasks that require the speed, since many computer operations are I/O, not compute bound.

SyracuseOrange Loc: Manlius,NY

If you really want to analyze what applications are using up the space on your C: drive I suggest you get the program WinDirStat. It is a free download and it installs easily. It will take a while to execute but it can show you in a tree structure all of the sub-directories, how much disk space they occupy, the percentage of the used space taken up by this sub-directory and then continues recursively going through the whole disk.

The tree information is then presented in a neat graphical presentation with each directory being sized relative to how much space it occupies. By clicking on any block in the graphical presentation you are linked back to the tree list to see what the block represents.

Gitchigumi Loc: Wake Forest, NC

Sounds interesting… I’ll check it out. Thanks!