Raymond.CC Blog

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.

[ Download TreeSize Free ]

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).

[ Download JDiskReport ]

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.