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This Is My Hard Disk Space Analyzer Of Choice
if you're starting to run short of hard disk space on your PC, there are two solutions. One, of course, is to add more. And with 1TB drives now available for around $100 it's tempting to do just that. But adding more disk space brings further problems. How are you going to back up all those extra files? Isn't it better to start by finding out why you're short of space, and perhaps trying to free up some storage by deleting or archiving stuff that isn't important?
Trouble is, of course, that Windows doesn't make it easy to find out where all your disk space has gone. Though thankfully, there are some useful freeware utilities that can help you. My favourite is simply called Scanner, and is produced by Steffen Gerlach. You can find it at http://www.steffengerlach.de/freeware/index.html.
It produces the sort of display you can see below, which shows the "video" folder on my PC. Within that folder are 2 folders called Personal and "TV Recordings". The blue part of the inner ring, and everything emanating from it, is the TV recordings part. The green part of the inner ring is the Personal section. By clicking any coloured section of the display I can drill down to other folders and see, instantly, where all the space is going.
I like Scanner because it's quick and simple. It runs on Windows XP and above, and the download is just 0.2 MB. You don't even need to install it - just download the zip file, unpack it, then double-click the scanner.exe file. It also comes with a tiny text file which, when clicked, will add the necessary registry entries to make the facility available on right-click when you're viewing a folder within Windows Explorer.
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Comments
I use windirstat for awile.
No complains.
There's an alternative I read about (I think) here in Gizmo's, it's called Spacesniffer: http://www.uderzo.it/main_products/space_sniffer/index.html
Fast, portable, reliable.
I downloaded it.
Tried it out.
Was amazed at what a useless waste of time the software was.
Trashed it.
Windows Explorer is good.
Another useful program, and the one I like enough to use, is WinDirStat.
Open source, find it at
http://windirstat.sourceforge.net/
It lets you tackle whole drives or individual folders, it combines a bar-type representation of space used attached to folders and files with a colour map associated with filetypes. This can be configured to behave like kdirstat (a Linux utility on which this program is based) or sequoiaview.
You can also define cleanups that can be performed by the program, although this requires an understanding of the use of the commandline and this aspect of the program is probably for experts only.
There's a portable version too, at
http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/windirstat_portable
Like other commentators, while I'm aware that different areas of the disk have very different performance rates, a circular map of the data doesn't make much sense to me for this type of utility -- a good defragmenter will handle that stuff for you, something this type of program doesn't (or shouldn't seek to) do for you.
Ditto on WinDirStat!
Has anyone tried SequoiaView. It's pretty old, but still works on all my Windows machines (XP, Vista, 7). Check it out here: http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderzoek/onderzoek_informatica/visualization/sequoiaview/
I can not understand how anyone thinks that this view is better than a simple tree view with the largest files (root) followed by the largest directories (Folders). Treesize is simple and very effective. I have tried these programs that give these fancy views. They are pretty to look at but they take twice as long to figure out where the space hogs are on the drive. In the picture above, where is the legend to show you what the different colors represent?
Treesize allows you to select the directory and then click on it. From there it shows a tree type breakdown of the files in that directory and the space used by the sub-directories. It is FAR more useful than any of these window candy programs.
Philip
Haven't tried these, but I use Spacemonger and it's great!
It has the best representation that I've found of any of these programs that I've used. And you can set it up for various colors for files and folders. Zooms in and out of folders, and deletes within the program.
I found lots of wasted disk space the first time I used it.
One of my long term favorites.
Oh come on, while quite pretty it's not a seriously useful tool.
Erm, where is the rest of your comment?.
It seems like after such a strong opening, an explanation and one or two examples need to follow, so that we who can't readily see what you mean will be able to get your point. As it stands, not very helpful. I still have try the thing myself. Even then it may be ages before I see what you mean.
This looks nice, and it is small, but I still like Treesize better. Treesize has beern around forever and they are constantly improving it. It also has this great advantage. It spots files you think you have deleted (especially on CDs and Flash drives), and it deletes files from inside itself without having actually to go to the folder to delete them. I also like the horizontal bar graphics of Treesize more than the circular presentation of Scanner. But that's just me.
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