WSUS: Drivers, Disk Space

[Gongalong]

Hi folks,

 

A couple of questions:

 

1. Is it worth enabling driver download on WSUS, and more to the point does it take up a lot of space?

2. How much space should WSUS use? I've enabled updates for XP through to Win 10, and for Office, and it's used around 350GB of space. Is that normal?

 

Thanks

[DavR]

WSUS is a monster for disk space, and quite inefficient at managing cleanup of old files (even if you do run the cleanup routines), so yes, I'm not surprised at 350GB. Only tick the products you definitely need, don't select whole families.

 

I've never tried drivers with WSUS, but I expect they will take up a whole bunch of space, given that any additional option in WSUS always does. Personally I prefer to keep control over driver versions, in theory the WU drivers are clean and tested, but feature-breaking updates are not unheard of.

[ollyyllo]

Do you have 'Download express instalation files' unticked, under - option > update files and languages > update files

I think the update files can be about 4x times bigger if this is selected.

 

also check 'Download updates only in these languages' is set to English, under - option > update files and languages > update langages

[andy_b]

We find this helps keep the monster under control: https://community.spiceworks.com/scripts/show/2998-adamj-clean-wsus

[3s-gtech]

Personally I'd say don't bother depending on a couple of factors. I've done a whole heap of driver downloading through Windows Update over the last couple of months, not bothering to put them into WSUS as I used them to build my reference image. Some machines needed 'topping up' with a few extra drivers where they differed from reference, but these weren't too bad. However, if you have a large number of recent machines, where newer driver updates may have significant performance benefits, it may well be worthwhile. You can still be selective so long as you don't enable Auto Approve.