Cleaning SSD and HDD: Guide to Freeing Space on Windows

The performance of SSD solid-state drives is superior to that of older mechanical HDD hard drives, but the cost per Gigabyte of these drives is higher
For this reason, in fixed computers , SSD hard drives are used, for system booting, coupled with mechanical disks for data storage; in many laptops, however, you have to choose either speed or space.
The use of two disks allows for very fast booting and high system responsiveness but also ample data storage space

Continuous Windows updates, installation of new programs, and saving the browsing cache and programs fills up more and more, risking running out, the space on these drives, giving the classic error of"space exhausted on device"

At this point a choice must be made between installing a new drive, with the costs involved, or cleaning our SSD

Windows, cleaning the browsing cache and programs

The first step to clean up our disk, is to use a program that deals with cache cleaning, such as Piriform's free CCleaner that allows us removal of temporary files of all installed programs
Alternatively, we can use the opensource bleachbit which has excellent functionality
These programs, perform cleaning of the SSD or Hard Disk, removing old files that remain saved on the computer of history, prefetch, preferences, cookies, temporary created by internet browsing and installed programs

Disk Cleanup, Windows update and restore points

Windows update and the restore utility use a lot of disk space, creating saves of the state of the computer, before an installation and keeping information for removing installed updates
The winsxs folder(C:\Windows\winsxs) is one of the locations to clean to free up space, but it cannot be deleted directly from file management, we would make the system unusable

To clean the winsxs folder , freeing up space, we use"Disk Cleanup" already present in the operating system or installable in the Windows add-ons

• we click on Start
• in the taskbar click on search
• Disk Cleanup
• click on Disk Cleanup
• we choose the drive in this case C:
• System File Cleanup (requires an administrator user)
• we select clean
• we can also select in the tab other options Restore system configuration and Shadow copies
• run cleanup
• in the disk cleanup window we click on delete
• delete file and OK

This will free up a lot of space if it has never been run