Hey guys,

Recently I have replaced my laptop HDD with a SSD. I am a bit short on cash, so I chose a relatively low capacity SSD. I've been keeping an eye on my local storage, and I was caught a bit off guard after I installed Bastion and Terraria via Steam. Now according to the description, both of the games should occupy roughly 1 GB of storage. However after the installations were complete, I checked my C: drive and my free storage space dropped from 81.0 GB to 78.9 GB. Can anyone help me out by explaining what happened?

It could be your system creating shadow copies as in backups I get those every day randomly so my disk sometimes has more space sometimes less

I'd suggest not having Steam installed on your SSD to begin with, it just adds unnecessary traffic. It's better to install it on the HDD and then install the games that actually get a benefit from being on an SSD (not that many) to the SSD when needed. The games on the new content system on Steam should already allow you to install them where you want but even if you have ones that don't you can use programs like Steammover or Savegamemanager to easily move them to and fro from.

Maybe Directx extras, .NET framework and others like that.
I think sometimes it installs on the Steam folder even if you already have it.

Check how large your steam folder is excluding "steamapps" where all the games are. Maybe some installation file, redist or cache was left but it sounds peculiarly.

When on windows, I usually keep games on a separate hdd. This way I can easily reinstall the system without loosing anything. The My Documents folder is also redirected to the second hdd (or ssd).

Try using these when you're trying to find out what drains your harddrive:

Spyglass
SpaceSniffer
WinDirStat

Its possible Window's system protection function made some restore points when you installed Steam, and then the games, and these restore points are taking up the extra space. I turn off system protection on my machine to save space on my SSD, but then again, I am pretty liberal with my backups and could re-install my OS and get up and running again very quickly if there is a failure. It could be risky otherwise.

I would also adjust your paging file (virtual memory). In Win7, the paging file it set to the same size as your RAM. As I have 16GBs of RAM, I manually set it to 2GBs to save space and its been fine ever since. I wouldn't disable it entirely, but you can save some space by reducing it.

Did you turn off File Indexing on the SSD? It serves no purpose on a SSD. Right Click the drive in WIndows Explorer, select properties and uncheck the bottom check box under the General Tab.

Yes, and then download this: Everything

You start it, wait a couple of seconds (depends on harddrive capacity, speed and CPU speed) then it has indexed everything and it's blazing fast. You can shut it down when you're done but you need to let it make an index everytime you start it so keep it in the background (takes like 20MB of physical RAM)

You can check if Steam uses this by going to the Steam install folder (usually C:\Program Files(x86)\Steam) and right-click SteamApps. This should show the space occupied by these programs. It could also be a Steam update which wasn't properly cleaned up.

EDIT: You can try to clear the folder "downloading" ind the SteamApps folder.