Sometimes my customers tells me that they’re running out of hard drive spaces. I would tell them to run Disk Cleaner to delete temporary files, uninstall programs that they don’t use it anymore and backup videos or pictures to CD or DVD media discs. They told me that they’ve done all that but they’re still left with 10% free space out of his 100GB hard drive! 10% of 100GB is not much because we’re constantly downloading stuff when we have broadband. What I did that time was go to Windows Explorer, right click and select Properties on every folders to find out which folder has files that is taking up the most space. I wasted quite a lot of time doing that and it doesn’t show my customer that I can do better than that. When I got home, I found a solution how to find out what files and folders that are taking up hard drive spaces easily and professionally.
I found two freewares that is able to help me find out where all my hard drive space went. This type of software is called “Disk Space Management” software.
1. TreeSize Free
TreeSize Free tells you where precious space has gone to. TreeSize Free can be started from the context menu of a folder or drive and shows you the size of this folder, including its subfolders. You can expand this folder in Explorer-like style and you will see the size of every subfolder. Scanning is done in a thread, so you can already see results while TreeSize Free is working. The space, which is wasted by the file system, can be displayed and the results can be printed in a report. TreeSize Free is freeware for Windows 9x/2000/XP/Vista.
What I like about TreeSize is it’s only 700kb in size and it’s portable. I can copy it in my USB flash drive and bring it around with me. No configuration is needed. Just run TreeSize executable, select the directory to scan(you can select the root of the drive) and within minutes, depending on the space being used, it’ll show you the size of the folders.
2. JDiskReport
JDiskReport enables you to understand how much space the files and directories consume on your disk drives, and it helps you find obsolete files and folders. The tool analyzes your disk drives and collects several statistics which you can view as overview charts and details tables.
What I really like about JDiskReport is, it has a pie chart beside the navigation and also the Top 50 tab which shows you the top 50 biggest files in your computer. The con about JDiskReport is it runs on Java. If you do not have Java installed on your computer, you can’t run it. However, if you want to redistribute JDiskReport on your web site or on a CD, you may contact them to get a JDiskReport Windows edition that includes Java (10 MB).
In my opinion, TreeSize wins in terms of simplicity and portability. As for JDiskReport, it has more functions than TreeSize. Since both of this freeware is small in size, no harm carry them with me on my USB flash drive.
Important Note: I’ve seen people simply deleting files that’s taking up hard drive space without confirming that it’s safe to delete. When they reboot, they got all sorts of error messages and resulting in their computer being unstable. Unless you’re very sure that the file or folder is junk, then you can delete it. Otherwise, you can copy the file to another location, reboot and use your computer for a day or two. If there’s no problem, then you can delete it off.
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thanks very much……this is what i was looking for…Treesize is the best software
Raymond,
what a great tip, how come the people whom created the Vista, Outlook don’t know it….
I found 2 monstrous sized Hotmail files for MS Outlook! So I moved them to E drive instead of C. Freeing C drive with additional 10 GB.
Thank you, thank you, thank you….
Hani
Raymond,
what a great tip, how come the people whom created the Vista, Outlook don’t know it….
I found 2 monstrous sized Hotmail files for MS Outlook! So I moved them to E drive instead of C. Freeing C drive with additional 10 GB.
Thank you, thank you, thank you….
Hani
Spacemonger is by far the best utility available. It shows a graphical reprentation of your hard drive in form of a box and you can see the stuff inside just like in the box. So whatever you want to clear, just delete it. And its a free utility and occupies just 93kb, the smallest a utility can be!
Download SpaceMonger 1.4.0 from
Thanks for sharing wonderful information.
Thank you so much! I was one of the people who got CCleaner and started wiping files and defragmenting my disk for small amounts of space, going through my official list of programs and finding nothing that takes up that much space, or finding things that take up space that i still use. You saved me so much space. Thank you.
Hi, thank you soo much! after a couple of months of wondering where approx 150GB had gone, this Free and easy to use program showed it up in minutes!! i am no PC expert and this is a fantastic program which works well…thanks again!
Thanks buddy.
Excellent software, does exactly what it says on the tin, easy to install and easy to use, thanks for sharing it.
Excellent software, does exactly what it says on the tin, simple to use and easily installed. Many thanks for sharing it.
Thanks, I was looking for something like this :)
WOW. This program rocks. I did a complete reformat and thought all my pics which I backed up onto an external hard drive would have been wiped out. Was driving me crazy why I only had 2 gigs left on my hard drive. All my pics and programs were still there. This sotware found it all and allowed me to clean up my computer. This ought to be on cnet to download bet you could get a million downloads easily. Thanks again.
Thanks SO much! I used JDiskReport and freed up 88GB of space!! I had no idea one of my programs was keeping backups of projects! Thanks again!
Thank you for the resource I will be using this often! :)
My name is jillimandaaadh I come from India I’m new at computers. I have doubt you can show space taken by hard drive how do you measure it without opening computers?
Hai!
This is Balaji i have a doubt that whether we can search a folder in the system hard disk based on there partitions using java, if so how can it be done
Regards
balaji
This is the best tool EVER!!! Ive regain 50 gb hardisc space using this and i loove it! thank u thank u thank u!!!
very useful thanks.
always good to know alternatives
but still prefer spacemonger … tested the others thought
sixty-five.cc/sm/
Had a look at WinDirStat and SequoiaView and both is fine, but I personally still prefer TreeView ;)
Thanks for mentioning, it gives other people more choices.
Nice… Wants to add one program to the above list of utilities..
win.tue.nl/sequoiaview/
I like this program interface more than TreeSize Free and JDiskReport. And it is a freeware :)
You can use Space monger – it is only trialware, but is very good. It has very friendly grapfic user interface, it is light and quite fast. It is a joy working with it.
Toorgle on it ;)
Wil it be better to run CCleaner to clean the files taking up hard drivers?
It’s entirely automatic so we can get rid of determining which files we should remove.
Reference: ccleaner.com/
windirstat.info
Free “squarified tree map” of your drive. I find this one the best.