SSD Disk Clean up – The Complete Process

by Paul | Last Updated: August 9, 2022

Maintaining your SSD for the Best Performance. Everything needs to be cleaned, yep including that dusty keyboard, you have never cleaned. Cleaning anything makes it fit for use and makes it last longer, anything you fail to attend to will fail you when you need it and an SSD is no exception.

What is SSD disk clean up?

It is a process of clearing up your SSD of any data i.e., files, folders. It is also stopping processes that take up space on your system. It is a necessary process that must be done regularly to maximize your SSD.

Now that we have established that this process must happen, let us point out a few ways you can carry out this process, a few tips, and tricks. These include simple changes you can make in a system that will prevent a build-up, reduction in data either by trade-off or making a compromise. Remember, you cannot defragment an SSD as it does not have moving parts.

SSD System Settings

Hibernation

Stop hibernating, like you can take a pause right now and do this immediately. Hibernating might be fun, but it stores your computer’s memory to your disk so that you can boot your system faster, but you have an SSD now, this is no longer necessary. The flash memory in your SSD makes your system boot faster.

System Restore

This might seem a little extreme, but this falls under the compromise category. System Restore is a backup folder that keeps your important files so if your PC has issues (especially start up issues), you can have your PC working again without losing a lot of your files and none in some scenarios. To free up space in your SSD, stopping this process is an option.

Page File

The SSD has a part that is allocated to your operating system. This part is referred to as a virtual memory, its purpose is to serve as a safety mechanism to prevent a collapse if your RAM is full. If your RAM is 4GB and above, that should be sufficient so you can reduce your page file just don’t make it less than 512MB. It is better to reduce this file than to delete it.

After reducing the size of your virtual memory, it is time to put checks in place to ensure you never have to rely on it, free up your RAM. There are programs that are taking up space in your RAM, stop the non-essential ones. Go to your task manager (you can search for it), click the Startup window, look through and disable the ones that are not necessary. It is possible you have some running as those setting might have been embedded in the setup of certain applications.

Disk Clean up

There is a windows option to clean your disk. Remember defragmenting your disk is not an option an SSD should not be defragmented as there are no moving parts. To use this option, type “disk cleanup” in your search bar. When you click it, select the drive you want to clean then choose all the types of files you want to delete.

Storage Sense

This process helps with automatic clean up. The Storage sense is a windows feature that is designed to delete files you do not need, temporary files and things in the recycle bin. Yes, there is a feature like that on your PC, just use the search bar and type “Storage Sense” and voila! You can also set it up to automatically transfer files to the cloud (OneDrive). Remember to leave it on, this will automate the process. You can also select the intervals that best suit you.

Manual Checks and Changes

Reduce Data

Go through your PC, look for all those unnecessary files, duplicate files, temp files and delete them. Delete them permanently, remember when you just delete, it goes to your recycle bin which still takes up space. After permanently deleting files, go to your recycle bin and clear it as you might have deleted files in the past and they are there.

Applications

Uninstall applications that are not important. Even if they have some value to you, decide if they are worth having an SSD with no space. Some applications will give you the option of removing all files or just uninstalling, always choose the former. After uninstalling, go through your program files, look for remnants of apps you have removed, and delete them.

External Drive

There are files that are not currently necessary, but they might be useful later. You can move these files to an external drive: USB flash drive, HDD, or SSD. Offloading files to an external drive can save you the hassle of deciding if a file you really want to keep should be deleted.

Online Storage

If you have reliable internet access and a good bandwidth, it might be time to store a huge portion of your files and folders online and leave very few on your SSD. This option is good if you can afford a subscription to secure your files as it is only free if the total size of your files is small.

Software

Junk Files

We already pointed out the importance of going through your files and deleting what you have deemed unnecessary. You can augment that process by using genuine software and other third-party tools to remove junk files, a popular one is EaseUS.

The emphasis here is “augment”, automated processes are great but a manual check is also important as there are files that might not fall into the junk files, temp files, or duplicate files category but there are no longer useful.

Antivirus

Asides from destroying your files, did you know that a virus can create dummy files to take up space? Deleting these files is not enough, you must have an active antivirus and run checks regularly. Also, set up the antivirus to monitor websites you visit when you browse the internet as you can also pick up a virus from there.