Free Disk Space Collection SCCM 2012

We have been having several users with older PC's complaining of low disk space errors.  These are normally shared Dell PC's with 80GB HDD's.  We have lots of surgerys where tens of nurses will log on and subsequently create a local profile.  As we have cached mode enabled for Outlook (don't ask) this creates massive .OST files in every profile.

I wanted SCCM to keep track of these machines and subsequently run a batch file that clears all the .OST files off the machine.

I wanted a collection that would list all machines with less than 1GB free disk space.  I created the collection courtesy of http://myitforum.com/myitforumwp/2013/12/09/sccm-2012-r2-free-disk-space-report/ but found it was empty no matter what.

I then eventually came across this post http://e-enfra.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/sccm-2012-free-disk-space-is-not.html instructing that by default the disk space isn't automatically collected by the hardware inventory cycle.

Enable this and just wait for the Harware Inventory Cycle to kick in and the disk space info will become available.

SCCM using wrong drive as distribution share

Due to the unnecessarily greedy nature of SCCM if when you create a package distribution point there is more than one drive available to the server it will always opt for the drive with most space.

Our server has 3 drives:

C:\ = 50GB System Drive (for OS etc)
D:\ = 200GB Data Drive (for package storage etc)
P:\ = 50GB Page File (it's an old VM)

It got to the point where our data drive got to 151GB capacity (49GB free) and discovered that the P:\ drive actually had 50GB available.... So it helped its self and created an SMSPKGP$ folder and proceeded to fill it up.

Then when P:\ got to 10GB free it realsied that C:\ had about 40GB free and proceeded to create a SMSPKG$ folder and so on and so forth.

This only became apparent to me after it had been utilising this space for a while so I discovered a nice little easter egg that isn't widely publicised by M$.

If there are drives on your SCCM server you don't want it to use simply create a file on the root of the drive named

NO_SMS_ON_DRIVE.SMS

I've seen various versions of this listed on different sites such as "nosmsondrive.sms"; let me tell you now - this doesn't work (or didn't for me).

I know now that the correct syntax is NO_SMS_ON_DRIVE.SMS as I had a "Install retrying" notice on an AppV package DP install and it stuck until I deleted this file.

Hope this can help someone else one day...

C