C drive space decrease while playing

My operating system is on an SSD which is only 120GB with about 10 GB left. For this reason I have steam on my D drive and I also set the MSFS install to a folder in the D drive instead of the default ‘app data’ location.

All worked well and I have 295 GB install on D drive after all the updates. I am now going through the basic training modules.

What I have noticed is that just doing the normal landing training tutorials in Sedona will cause my final 10GB on my C drive to go down to about 5GB and when I exit the game it goes back to 10GB.

I have looked at the ‘flightsimulator’ folders in appdata roaming and appdata local and neither locations account for the sudden use of 5GB. There is no other flightsimulator install folder as far as I can see and RAM use is 10/16Gb and VRAM is 5/8Gb so there is no virtual memory overspill or anything.

Does anyone know the source of this in game SSD usage? As I will need to reroute it to the D too.

What are your page file / virtual memory settings? (Initial size and maximum size).

VRAM is 5/8Gb so there is no virtual memory

VRAM and Virtual Memory are two different things. VRAM is Video RAM, not virtual memory / paging file so not sure if you were indicating your page file size, or your GPU’s memory usage.

If you have rolling cache enabled you would have to specify where you want that running.

I thought that virtual memory is only used when you ran out of RAM/VRAM, those were indicating my memory usage.

My roaming cache is set to off currently. If it was on it would go to the roaming folder.

What is it set to?

On windows my virtual memory settings are minimum 16mb, recommended 2937mb and currently allocated 6596.

Do you think windows is creating this space ‘just in case’ even though I haven’t exceeded limits yet?

Once I got a paging error even with 10GB. Now I have a single fixed 15GB on C: and zero issues

On small drives like that you need considerably more than 10GB provisioning (free space). This is on top of your page file. I’m not sure about W10 but in W11 if the drive turns red in the ‘This PC’ window than you must act or you risk corrupting your data/system. At the very least your load times will start to crawl.

TBH my camera has an SD card bigger than your SSD. You need a drive big enough for both system, programs and the sim base files and there’s little reason not to upgrade when even a 250GB SSD is very cheap nowadays

Your operating system shouldn’t be filling up a 120GB SSD. Have you tried running the disk cleanup and selecting the clean up system files option?

Yes there is more than my operating system on it. I did some cleaning up and now it is 30GB free (Historic AMD installers took up 10GB which seems excessive).

I will keep that 30GB free as a buffer. I assume the 5 GB I mentioned was the windows virtual memory allocation and hopefully this larger gap will make it moot as far as flight simulator is concerned.

The 5GB is likely temp files that store data while the sim is running, I’m guessing it’s your rolling cache, but I could be wrong.

If you go into the sim settings, you can change the location of the rolling cache to be on a different drive (I have mine in E:\MSFS\RollingCache\ and that would rule out that problem. Just delete the one in the default location first. Might be worth a try.

rolling cache delate by itself?

Sorry, no. I can see how that would be confusing. I meant rolling cache as a separate thing to the temp area.