Wildly different amount of space available in Parallels vs Boot Camp

SOLVED: Hibernate and paging files differences

On a 15" Retina (256 sdd) I have sectioned off ~60gb for the Boot Camp partition. I used that for a couple days and then yesterday also installed Parallels (8), and I can't quite say if this happened right away or after downloading some things (Although I do believe it's the latter) depending on how I boot into windows it shows different amounts of space available on the SDD.

Through Parallels it seems to show the proper amount of 19.1 of 59.7 gb free, you open the C drive select all and properties to see the total file amount of 41.7 so that all seems to be roughly correct.

Now through straight bootcamp, with no changes made other than a simple restart the same disk is showing 7.07 of 59.7 free, while opening and selecting all once again shows 41.7. (I suppose they may not pick up on any hidden files?)

So thats a ~12 gb difference completely unaccounted for. Is boot camp throwing some 12gb large paging file or something? I noticed this bouncing back and forth between the two while steam is set to autostart and I feel as though it may have duplicated some files it was downloading or something. Aside from the initial 22gb or so taken by the windows install (win 7 pro, windows folder itself proper lists 16.2gb) the only large programs installed have been three Steam games totaling ~22gb. So 19gb free seems a bit large, but more a more sensible estimate of free space than 7gb does.

Sorry about the obtuse topic title I wasn't really sure how to state the issue succinctly, and let me know if something I have said doesn't make any sense. I have absolutely no issues with Parallels other than this one minor thing, it works just amazingly. Thanks!

 

How much RAM do you have? 12 GB? Might be the hibernation file (equals de amount of RAM) in Bootcamp.

 

Oh! Interesting, let me try that out. I have 8gb, does Parallels not activate hibernation? Let me reboot really quick and disable it and see.

 

That seems to have bumped it up 6gb. It now shows 13.0gb free. Interestingly enough Parallels now shows 19.9gb free, a .8gb bump (no other changes were made). That seems to have helped a bit, but not quite there with a 6.9gb difference now. Could they somehow be configured for different amounts of virtual ram?

 

Oh man apologies for the triple post but yeah the paging file must be the culprit for the remaining space:

Parallels
Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 1.00 GB
Total Physical Memory 1.00 GB
Available Physical Memory 313 GB
Total Virtual Memory 2.00 GB
Available Virtual Memory 806 GB
Page File Space 1.00 GB



Boot Camp
Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 8.00 GB
Total Physical Memory 7.91 GB
Available Physical Memory 6.51 GB
Total Virtual Memory 15.8 GB
Available Virtual Memory 14.3 GB
Page File Space 7.91 GB

Difference:
Installed Physical Memory (RAM) +7.00 GB
Total Physical Memory +6.91 GB
Available Physical Memory +6.20 GB
Total Virtual Memory +13.8 GB
Available Virtual Memory +13.5 GB
Page File Space +6.91 GB

 

Oh yes, I forgot to mention that, the paging file is different on both environments because the RAM presented in either of them is different.

Still, as to used space by Win 7, a Windows 7 typical/fresh installation (without page/hybernation files, just the Windows folder) isn't 16 GB, is about half of that, maybe it has to do with Windows Update and Temporary files/logs.

 

Hmm, it is Win 7 Pro, which contains a complete copy of XP for legacy purposes. I felt it was a little large still as well. The fresh install (including paging and hibernate) took up ~22gb of space. I did run a full clean on temp files and such the best I could before I made this thread, so while some may have escaped me, I doubt 8gb worth.