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I just finished installing my GPU and I reconnected the SSD into a different SATA port. I booted up the PC and notice that 30GB has just been taken up in the SSD. I re plug the SATA port into its original spot and Viola, got the space back.

What the hell just happened?! Never seen that before or heard of it.

eesh, no responses

Sounds like a hibernation file was created on the second port but not on the first. Not sure how that could happen, but it's all I've got.

Well, it's going to be hard to determine without some more information - something like a hibernate file or pagefile or something could make sense, but not really if you're only sporting 8gb of RAM. Maybe something to do with a hidden restore partition if you cloned over your original Dell install to the SSD? I would take a look at disk management both now and on the other port to see if a partition magically appears or not. Another tool would be something like windirstat http://windirstat.info to analyse where the space is being used - again before and after. 30gb should be pretty easy to spot, especially in a 120gb SSD.

Ok, so i downloaded windirstat and plugged the drive back into the port where i lost the Gb's. Sure enough there is a pagefile there. But why is it doing this? I did use acronis to clone over a fresh install of Win8 when i first got the drive. But why is this showing up on one port and not the other?

Just guessing here, but it sounds like moving the drive to another port has caused Windows to get confused about where your pagefile is supposed to be. I assume your pagefile is normally located on your other (mechanical) drive?

Do the drive letters stay the same when you connect the drive to the other port?

Still doesn't explain why it is taking up 30GB though. With only 8GB of RAM the pagefile should not be that large (unless you've explicitly set it that large for some reason).

The drive letter did not change and I haven't touched the pagefile for any reason. Just really weird and started to freak me out when I booted up and saw the missing Gb's.

Did you run windirstat on the original port? How big is your pagefile there? I'm glad there is a reason for the difference (larger pagefile) but I can't reason why it would be larger on one port vs the other. Have you tried a third port to see which of the behaviors you get there?

Could be the WinSXS folder, which can be HUGE and is based on hardlinks which are easily upset by a change in port ID.

Being hardlinks, the chances are good that the "missing" space was never really missing, just a reporting error. (Not that it's excusable. Microsoft has yet to even acknowledge it as an issue....)

Chrispy_ wrote:

Could be the WinSXS folder, which can be HUGE and is based on hardlinks which are easily upset by a change in port ID.

Being hardlinks, the chances are good that the "missing" space was never really missing, just a reporting error. (Not that it's excusable. Microsoft has yet to even acknowledge it as an issue....)

Ahh, I hadn't thought of that. I suppose that could be it.

Do you have any prior experience with port changes causing problems with hard links? I don't know much about how hard links are implemented internally by NTFS, but in *NIX file systems (e.g. ext4) the port ID is irrelevant when creating hard links.