2.6TB Freed in One Evening: AI-Assisted System Maintenance
Claude Code found my forgotten 4TB drive.
My boot drive hit 93% full. I’d been ignoring it for months.
One conversation with Claude Code later: I discovered a 4TB Samsung 990 PRO—one of the fastest consumer NVMe drives you can buy—sitting in my machine completely empty. No partitions. Not mounted. I’d installed it and apparently never set it up.
That’s the thing about system maintenance. It’s never urgent until something breaks. So it doesn’t happen. Drives sit empty, caches balloon, boot drives fill up while you’re busy building things that actually matter.
AI changes the math. The tedious audit becomes a conversation. And suddenly the work just… gets done.
The Audit
Me: “Give me an audit of my system specs and tell me about updates I need.”
Two minutes later I had the full picture: 104 packages outdated (23 security), BIOS nearly two years behind, and 5.4TB of storage I bought and never configured. The kind of comprehensive check I’d been putting off because who has time to grep through lsblk output and chase down modification dates?
Claude Code does. It ran the commands, sorted the results, and surfaced what mattered.
What We Found
Forgotten hardware:
- 4TB Samsung 990 PRO NVMe - empty
- 2TB Crucial MX500 SATA - empty
- 5.4TB of storage collecting dust
The graveyard of 2024 experiments:
- 162GB text-generation-webui with models from before DeepSeek existed
- 101GB of pip/poetry/docker cache
- 71GB of llamafile models from August
- 90GB of LLM experiments from March 2024
- 55GB Unreal Engine 5.2.1 (we’re on 5.5 now)
BIOS situation:
- Running version 1904 from January 2024
- Current: 3402 from November 2025
- Two years of AGESA updates missing for my Ryzen 9 7950X3D
The Fix
Claude Code walked through each step. Not tutorials—actual commands for my specific hardware.
Set up the 990 PRO for Steam:
sudo parted /dev/nvme1n1 --script mklabel gpt
sudo parted /dev/nvme1n1 --script mkpart primary ext4 0% 100%
sudo mkfs.ext4 -L SteamLib /dev/nvme1n1p1Added fstab entry, moved 1.1TB of games, created symlink. Boot drive dropped from 93% to 30% instantly.
Cleaned the cruft:
Before deleting anything, Claude Code checked timestamps. “Make sure nothing is from December 2025 to January 2026—we probably want those.” It found the cutoff, confirmed the old stuff was actually old, then cleared it out.
- Purged pip cache (26GB)
- Cleared poetry artifacts (31GB)
- Docker system prune (38GB)
- Deleted LLM experiments from March 2024
- Removed text-generation-webui (no models newer than April 2025)
Prepped the hardware upgrade:
I’ve got new RAM coming that needs a BIOS update first. Claude Code found my exact motherboard (ASUS ROG STRIX X670E-E), verified the new kit is on the QVL, looked up the latest BIOS, and wrote the full upgrade procedure to a file. Tomorrow’s project, already planned.
The Numbers
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| Boot drive: 93% (129GB free) | Boot drive: 24% (1.3TB free) |
| WhiteBoySummer: 55% | WhiteBoySummer: 25% |
| 990 PRO: Empty | 990 PRO: Steam library |
| Total free: ~900GB | Total free: ~2.6TB |
Two hours total. Most of that was waiting for 1.1TB to copy.
The Point
This is AI leverage applied to the stuff you never get around to.
System maintenance, hardware audits, cleaning up old experiments—it’s all important and none of it is urgent. So it rots. You buy drives and forget to configure them. You accumulate 162GB of outdated LLM tools because deleting things requires figuring out what’s safe to delete.
AI collapses the friction:
- “What’s eating my disk space?” → Sorted breakdown in seconds
- “How old are these files?” → Timestamps on everything
- “Is this safe to delete?” → Checks modification dates first
- “Set up this drive” → Commands for your specific hardware
The best upgrade was already in my machine. I just needed a reason to find it.