Once your full C: volume is backed up to a WIM file it's not too bad even on bare metal. If you keep C: under about 20GB, the resulting WIM is about half that

Once your full C: volume is backed up to a WIM file it's not too bad even on bare metal. If you keep C: under about 20GB, the resulting WIM is about half that size and easy to deal with. To deploy using a 30GB partition it only takes about 5 minutes to write zeros to the 30GB, another 5 minutes to quickformat and deploy the WIM file to the fresh partition (in naturally well-defragmented condition), then a judicious BCDBOOT command to make it boot from your present BOOT or EFI folder.