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Comment by rasz_pl | Hacker News Reader

>We live in a post-file-system-compression world.

says a guy working for a company shipping system with >6GB (often 10GB in 100K individual small files!) of redundant NEVER EVER touched data inside WinSxS. Data that cant be moved off the main drive without serious hacks (hardlinking). This fits in the general pattern of indifference to user hardware. Another one (my fav) is non movable hiberfil.sys that MUST be on primary drive, cant even move it with hardlinks. There goes 16GB of your SSD for a file that gets used ONCE per day.

This is what happens when you hire straight out of college programmers and put them on top of the line workstations.

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If you disable hibernation then the hiberfil will disappear. With low power states in modern computers, sleep is suffice (hibernate is a relic from old Windows):

> powercfg -h off

tbf... almost all of WinSXS is hardlinks, there is very little actual duplication. It's just that explorer doesn't understand that and reports it as duplication.

easily disproved:

C:\WINDOWS\system32>dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /AnalyzeComponentStore

Windows Explorer Reported Size of Component Store : 8.18 GB

Actual Size of Component Store : 7.78 GB

The next line of the output from the command you specified but which you didn't quote and that gives almost 5 GB on the machine in the example it is named "Shared with Windows"

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn251566.aspx

"This value provides the size of files that are hard linked so that they appear both in the component store and in other locations (for the normal operation of Windows). This is included in the actual size, but shouldn’t be considered part of the component store overhead."

1 you specifically said "WinSXS is hardlinks", this is not true

2 still leaves up to 5GB of redundant garbage in WinSXS, things like multiple versions of random DLLs nobody ever uses, 360MB for ~11 versions of 'getting started' package consisting of same movie files, color calibration data for obscure scanners on bare minimal install etc

Turning drive compression omits this directory while happily compressing files in /system.

> you specifically said

No, you communicated before with somebody else.

> still leaves up to 5GB of redundant garbage

No, if you read that example, there is less than 1 GB which is stale (the diff between the first and the third number):

>> Windows Explorer Reported Size of Component Store : 4.98 GB

>> Actual Size of Component Store : 4.88 GB

>> Shared with Windows : 4.38 GB

As I've said, you intentionally didn't quote your machine's third line but I'm sure it's not a 5 GB difference.

Moreover, that difference can be purged if necessary. Which you can also do on your machine with just a single command, per link on the same page:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn251565.aspx

There is a trade-off, the probable case why nobody does it unless really necessary:

"All existing service packs and updates cannot be uninstalled after this command is completed"

To be more precise, CBS is to blame for this.

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